Mexico recorded a current account deficit of US$13.423 billion as a result of credits of US$706.355 billion and debits of US$719.779 billion, according to data from the Bank of Mexico.
As a proportion of GDP, in 2022 the current account deficit stood at 0.9%, higher than the deficit of 0.6% of GDP recorded in 2021.
The negative current account balance in 2022 derived from the combination of a deficit in the balance of goods and services of US$41.46 billion, a deficit in the balance of primary income of US$30.032 billion, and a surplus in the balance of secondary income of US$58.068 billion.
Current Account Components (Millions of dollars)
Like the rest of the world, Mexico faced a difficult situation during the last few years: economic production decreased 8.2% in 2020.
Nevertheless, the current account of the balance of payments recorded a positive balance in 2020, and manufacturing exports (about one third of GDP) remained stable relative to total production.
The current account deficit of the balance of payments exceeded US$20 billion each year of the 2016-2018 period, representing between 1.7 and 2.2% of GDP.
The behavior of the oil balance, the services balance and the primary income balance fundamentally explain these deficits.
On the other hand, the surplus in the secondary income account, particularly from remittances, continued to increase.
The Covid-19 pandemic caused a sharp contraction in exports and imports of goods and services in 2020.
Current account
However, the drop in imports was larger, resulting in a current account surplus in the balance of payments, to the tune of US$26.21 billion, or 2.4% of GDP.
In 2021, the trade balance recorded a deficit of $14.491 billion (0.9% of GDP).
In the 2017-2021 period, Mexican real GDP recorded an average annual real growth rate of just 0.2 percent; excluding 2017, there was an average annual real decline of -0.46 percent.
This result was significantly influenced by the effects of the pandemic that led to one of the largest economic contractions in Mexico’s history, building on the backdrop of an already depressed economy in 2019.
Despite this, nominal Mexican per capita nominal income has remained around $10,000 for the past four years.
