We interview Sofía Ramírez Aguilar, head of México, ¿Cómo Vamos?, a leading Mexican think tank, on one of Mexico’s biggest economic challenges: labour-market informality, and what to do about it.
About 55% of employed Mexicans work informally, meaning they lack social-security or legal protections. Beyond that, informal workers earn less than half what formal workers make.
Sofía explains why informality has proved so persistent, and how it is connected to Mexico’s low productivity, education, gender inequalities and company size. The productivity divide is huge: microbusinesses employ 41% of Mexico’s workers but generate only 16% of economic value added, while large companies employ 29% and produce 54%. The issue is therefore not simply how to formalise workers, but how doing so can help Mexico create more productive firms and better jobs.
First, Eduardo and Damian discuss the week’s big economic stories:
* Delta-Aeroméxico wins in court: why the Delta JV is central to Aeroméxico’s network economics.
* US-Canada trade talks collapse: could Canada’s confrontation with Washington actually make a Mexico-US bilateral deal more likely?
* The Mexican economy: Banxico upgrades its 2026 growth forecast to 1.5%, helped by booming non-auto exports and electronics.
* Mexico’s AI hardware boom: Pegatron, Foxconn, Inventec, Wiwynn and Flex are helping turn Mexico into a massive supplier of servers and data-centre equipment to the US.
* Enterprise AI comes to Mexico: Primero’s US$12 million seed round and Wonderful’s Mexican expansion show how implementing and developing platforms for AI inside large, complicated Mexican companies is becoming a hot business.
