• Fish catch per year: 1.47m tonnes
• Oil production and reserves: 3.79m b/d (16bn barrels)
• Estimated livestock resources: 30.8m cattle, 18.1m pigs, 9.5m goats, 540m chickens
• Main mineral resources: Oil, gas, gold, silver, copper, coal, fluorite, mercury, antimony

Electricity generation

Mexico is one of the largest oil exporters outside OPEC. Most oil production comes from offshore drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. The industry is state-owned and state-run by PEMEX, the world's fifth-largest oil company, employing 120,000 people. Plans to privatize PEMEX have provoked serious social unrest, and proposed sell-offs and deregulation remain politically highly sensitive. Despite its oil reserves, Mexico has embarked on a nuclear power program and projects to modernize the national electricity grid and boost natural gas production to overcome an energy crisis.

Consumption and spending

Mexico has enormous wealth disparities. The World Bank estimates that 45 million Mexicans live in poverty, surviving on less than $2 a day, and a quarter of them struggle in extreme poverty, coping on half that amount. There is little social mobility; the old Spanish families retain their hold on institutions. In the past, the wealthy did not generally pay taxes and often benefited from the large state machine. Tax evasion remains a serious problem.

Rural Amerindians are probably the most disadvantaged group. In the last decade, poverty has forced them into city slums to work in factories or maquiladoras, where conditions and pay can be poor. The 1994 Chiapas rebellion was fed by demands for more land and more assistance in farming it. The flow of poor rural migrants to the US stems largely from the need to subsidize families back home.

• Total number of visitors per year: 18.7m visitors
• Tourism trend: Down 5% in 2003

Main tourist arrivals

Tourism employs around 5% of the workforce and is a major source of foreign exchange. Attractions include excellent beach resorts such as Acapulco on the Pacific coast, and the new resorts of the Peninsula de Yucatán on the Caribbean coast. Impressive coastal scenery, volcanoes, the Sierra Madre, and archaeological remains of Aztec and Mayan civilizations, designated as World Heritage sites, are major draws, as are the many colonial cities, such as Morelia and Guadalajara, which have remained virtually intact since their construction after the Spanish conquest.