Hello all! This entry marks the very first of a new series, “Mala’s Data Digest”. Each month I’ll be featuring a different country and show you some of the interesting data you can pull using our sites, www.census.gov/trade and //usatrade.census.gov/.

Recently, I was sent an interesting blog post called, ” Mexico is the hot new import market” from the Jacksonsville Business Journal; it compared Mexico and China’s trade with the United States. In it, Szakonyi states that imports into the U.S. from Mexico have grown more than China compared to last year. Since I have all this data at my fingertips, I thought I’d check it out. So, I went onto USA Trade Online and pulled year to date figures for Mexico and China and then calculated the percent change from year to year.

As you can see, the import growth rate from Mexico is higher than China’s import growth rate for July 2010 year to date (37% growth for Mexico versus 22% for China) as the blog states.

I wonder if Mexico will continue to grow at such a rate or if it’s just recovering from a harder hit in 2009 where their imports decreased by 27% and China’s decreased by 14%. If you look at the dollar values, you will also see that Mexico imports for July 2010 year to date are lower than July 2008 year to date. This is not to say that it isn’t possible that Mexico’s import growth rate will not continue to rise, but I’ll be interested to see what happens in the next year. Will Mexico’s import growth rate continue to outpace China’s in the years to come or was this just a recovery from the recession? I know I’ll be using USA Trade Online to keep an eye on these numbers to see what happens!