Mexico reforms designed to facilitate foreign investment

By Adina Moloman

Sources:  OECD, www.presidencia.gob.mx

Despite staging a strong recovery, Mexico economy still faces more challenges, before talking of stability.

Considering that this is a presidential election year, governmental institutions were more concerned since last year of making Mexico’s economic environment conducive for large-scale foreign and domestic investment by working on agendas where top priority is new regulation or modifications of reforms aimed at helping facilitate business.

The modifications of reforms which affect laws such as the Foreign Investment Law, the General Law of Mercantile Societies entered into effect in 2012.

The federal Government over the past 2, 3 years implemented actions to eliminate unnecessary procedures and worked on fiscal simplification also to attract new investment.

One of these actions is the approval of the Federal Low on Competitiveness Reform to combat monopolies businesses.

The results that are expected and in some cases are registering important advances are: More effective antitrust policy; Alignment with best international practices; Better tools for the competition authority; more transparency and accountability.

Zero base Regulatory Reform, is a measure which involves reductions on firms transaction costs and the elimination of inefficient procedures and norms.

According to the Ministry of Economy, regulatory simplification yield estimated savings for 2.8 billion USD (5 tax simplification measures and 12 simplification measures for electronic, agricultural and medical products).

Also is mentioned the reduction and simplification of internal regulations in the Public Administration, where16,000 internal regulations were eliminated and 9 handbooks replaced more than 7,000 rules.

The site tuempresa.gob.mx was created to reduce the number of procedures time and investment required for opening up a new business. According to the presidential informal the number of days required for the application of registering a new firm was reduced to nine days in 2011.

Most of this actions where more oriented on Maquiladora Industry, rather than small businesses.