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 Business News | January 2006 
Border Business is Booming
 Angela Shah - Dallas Morning News
| | Mexican shoppers account for $3.5 billion in retail sales along the border – or $10 million each day. |
San Antonio – A multitude of day trips across the Texas-Mexico border where shoppers spend around $20 for groceries and other sundry items adds up to a huge economic force that yokes both economies together.
While border retailing comprises 2 percent of the state's total, it packs a much bigger punch for some Texas cities. Laredo, for example, depends on Mexican shoppers for more than half of all retail sales.
“The action, the excitement, the growth, is happening in these four cities,” said Dallas Fed president Richard W. Fisher of Texas major border towns.
He added that the make up of those border economies underscore that anyone interested in a prosperous Texas – and, for that matter, in a prosperous nation -- should care whether Mexico is able to sustain and grow a robust domestic economy.
Border retailing and the impacts on economies on both sides of the border is the subject of a Friday conference sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and Chicago and the International Council of Shopping Centers. The first part of the series examined border retailing along the U.S.-Canada border and was held in October.
Mexican shoppers account for $3.5 billion in retail sales along the border – or $10 million each day. Downtown El Paso retailers say Mexican nationals accounted for 90 percent of sales, panelists said. The same is true of Brownsville’s city center, which is within walking distance from the international border.
That vibrant economy will continue to grow, the economists said. Border communities in both America and Mexico are expected to grow by faster rates than those nations as a whole.
While the population in each of those NAFTA partners should grow by about 10 percent in the next decade, growth rates in border communities in Mexico and the United States could reach as high as 47 percent and 25 percent, respectively
“With that you’ll see economic growth,” said Suad Ghaddar, a research associate at the Center for Border Economic Studies at the University of Texas -- Pan American in Edinburg.
ashah@dallasnews.com |
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