Interview: Trump victory could bring flight of capital in Mexico: economists

Mexican economists predict a lower foreign direct investment (FDI) and a possible flight of capital from the country if U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gets into the White House.

Gabriela Siller, head economic-financial analyst at Banco Base financial group, told Xinhua Saturday that the FDI in Mexico is continuous, but it has decreased this year compared to 2015.

According to the expert, the reason behind this was not bad economic conditions but the uncertainty surrounding the normalization of the Federal Reserve's interest rates and the elections in the United States.

Siller said Mexico's total FDI in 2015 was 32 billion U.S. dollars whereas in the first half of 2016, 14.385 billion dollars were received.

However, Siller said that this scenario could be avoided if Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton is elected U.S. president and even "for the coming year, it would increase the FDI between 15 and 20 percent."

A specialist from the Institution of Economic Investigations (IIEc) at Mexico's National Autonomous University (UNAM), Violeta Rodriguez del Villar, said that the official result of the FDI so far this year is "considering re-investments."

"It is not necessarily new investment, but a part that Mexico receives are re-investments," said the expert.

Rodriguez del Villar agreed that maintaining a dependency on the United States is "a threat" and the perception surrounding Trump's case is not good.

During his electoral campaign, Trump has expressed racist and xenophobic remarks regarding migrants, particularly undocumented Mexicans, whom he has called dangerous criminals and rapists.

Trump has also said that if he is elected president, he will look to modify or eliminate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), made up of Canada, the United States and Mexico, and he will increase taxes by 30 percent on exported Mexico products.

Trump also wants U.S. companies with facilities in other countries to return to the United States.

"In Mexico, we haven't managed to move away from having a structural dependence on trade and investment from the United States. Things have been heating up and there is a strong trend towards synchronizing the dynamic of the Mexican economy with the U.S. one," the UNAM academic told Xinhua.

The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) predicted that Mexico could attract around 28.3 billion dollars in FDI this year, thanks to the implementation of structural reforms, according to preliminary data from ECLAC.

The FDI that reaches Mexico's manufacturing sector is the one that generates most jobs.

Earlier this week, Mexico's President Enrique Pena Nieto said that the country has attracted 120 billion dollars in FDI over the past four years. This is 40 percent more than in the same period during the past administration (2006-2012), allowing more than 2.3 million jobs to be created. Endi