The North American continent boasts a total GDP amounting to $25.66 trillion and has a population of 579 million people.
The continent is richly endowed with natural resources, including vast mineral wealth, great forests, huge quantities of fresh water, some of the world’s most fertile soils, crude oil reserves amounting to roughly 36 billion metric tons, thousands of beautiful beaches and coastlines in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.
North America covers an area of 24.71 million square kilometers and is the third-largest continent by area, following Asia and Africa, and the fourth by population after Asia, Africa, and Europe.
The most spoken languages in North America are English(334M), Spanish(195M) and French(18M).
Mexico City’s metropolitan area is the largest urban area in North America with a population of 22M, followed by New York(8.4M), Los Angeles(3.99M) and Toronto(2.93M).
With regards to education, North America boasts 6750+ colleges and universities across Mexico(~1250), the USA(~5300) and Canada(~223).
Canada has the most highly educated workforce in the world. Nearly 58% of Canadians have a post-secondary education. Their average salary is ~$72,000USD/year. The USA has a highly ranked high skilled workforce with an average salary of ~$97,000USD/year. The workforce in Mexico is mostly in the mid skilled range and is well-educated, plentiful and reliable. Graduating around 115,000 engineering and technical students nationally per year, Mexico produces roughly three times more graduates per capita in the field than the United States. Mexico’s average salary is ~$16,500 USD/year.
Mexico and Canada are already the USA’s largest trading partners followed by China and Japan. The North American economy, largely in part due to its record trade numbers, is today of one the largest economic blocks in the world.
As we can see from the above data the workforce skill mix of Mexico complements well with its northern counterparts. In fact, workforces in Canada and the USA compete with each other in high skilled labor and need low and mid skilled workforces to produce price competitive manufactured goods and services.
While all this sounds nice and comforting, today we face a significant risk due to a high dependency of our region’s economy on Asian countries for multiple lines of manufactured components and electronics(I’ve covered this in other posts). Especially, in an every time more deglobalized and fractured geopolitical landscape.
The current supply chain and logistics infrastructure in North America are sufficient for current trade needs, but for self-sufficiency in high-end manufacturing, improvements are needed with regards to efficiency and robustness.
The good news is the social, legal, geographical and economic conditions to achieve a self-sufficient regional economic block already exist. Success on this front will highly depend on achieving a general consensus recognizing the geopolitical existential importance of this objective and the cooperation between the countries’ leaders, both public and private.