Mexico’s rich flourish

July 01, 2013

By Frontera NorteSur

A Great Recession? Not for Mexico’s rich. In fact, the number of people in the Mexican Republic defined as wealthy by the corporate research outfit WealthInsight grew by almost a third between late 2007 and late 2012, a time when high unemployment and hard times had most people scrambling to make ends meet.

According to WealthInsight, the total number of Mexican residents who held wealth valued at than one million dollars (minus their principal home) reached 145,000 at the end of last year. Of this group, 2,450 people were classified as multi-millionaires.

Overall, the millionaire-plus class possessed a fortune of $736 billion, or 43 percent of the entire amount of individual wealth in Mexico. Sixteen persons were identified as falling in the billionaire category. The 2010 Census counted 112, 336, 538 people inhabiting the country.

Holding an estimated fortune of $72.7 billion, Mexican magnate Carlos Slim is in a back-and-forth contest with Bill Gates for the mantle of the world’s richest man.

True to a centralized pattern that goes back to colonial or even pre-colonial days, Mexico’s rich are concentrated in the Valley of Mexico, the home of Mexico City and its sprawling suburbs. The Mexican capital was found to be the residence of 1,088 people with “elevated” sums of wealth far beyond a million dollars.

Monterrey came in second for the place of residency of the super-rich, with 208 such persons, followed by Guadalajara with 129.

The Mexican rich bucked a worldwide trend in which the number of wealthy individuals declined slightly by 0.3 percent from 2007 to 2012. In Mexico, however, the number of millionaires actually increased by 32 percent.

The UK-based WealthInsight firm also detected a trend of the rich keeping more of their money in Mexico. Researchers estimated the amount of money parked offshore by the Mexican rich decreased from 23.2 percent in 2007 to 21.9 percent in 2012, for a total of $161 billion stashed outside the country.

Sources: El Diario de Juarez/Notimex, June 18, 2013. NBC Latino, May 17, 2013. Article by Adrian Carrasquillo. Forbes.com, March 7, 2013. Article by D. Estevez. Inegi.org.mx

This piece was written by:

Frontera NorteSur

Frontera NorteSur (FNS) is the online news service of the Center for Latin American and Border Studies at New Mexico State University. Since the early 1990s, FNS has reported on the borderlands, Mexico and beyond. In addition to publishing FNS, the Center for Latin American and Border Studies sponsors lectures, hosts conferences and promotes graduate and undergraduate courses. FNS Editor Kent Paterson has covered the U.S. Southwest, Mexico and Latin America for more than 30 years as a print and radio journalist.

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