Mexico’s export concentration ranks 69th out of 70 economies evaluated, according to the Institute for Management Development (IMD).
This illustrates a critical dependence on trade with the United States.
The indicator measures the concentration of foreign sales by partner: exports to the top five countries as a percentage of total foreign sales.
Concentration of Mexico’s Exports
This metric is part of the 2026 World Competitiveness Ranking, in which the Switzerland-based IMD evaluates 70 economies worldwide. In the overall index, Mexico fell from 55th to 62nd place.
In 2025, Mexico exported goods worth 666,000 million dollars. Of that amount, 545,000 million went to the United States.
The top five destinations for Mexican goods exports in 2025, in millions of dollars, are listed below:
- United States: 545,000.
- Canada: 219,000.
- China: 9,900.
- Germany: 7,700.
- South Korea: 5,300.
In 2026, the Mexican economy faces a scenario of moderate growth. This is due to weakened domestic demand, a gradual slowdown in the labor market, and private investment that continues to be constrained by domestic and trade uncertainties, as well as energy prices.
Rule of Law
In the report, Arturo Bris, director of the IMD World Competitiveness Center, noted that every year he is asked the same question: What makes an economy competitive? He went on to say that every year, the honest answer strays a little further from the one typically found in textbooks.
Bris continued with the following remarks. Costs matter. Scale matters. Talent, technology, infrastructure, and market access also matter. However, none of these factors explains why, in a world that is visibly fragmenting, capital, people, and trust continue to concentrate in a handful of places. These are not always the cheapest, the largest, or the most technologically advanced, but they are places where people believe in the rules.
“All of this may sound a bit didactic. But an important conclusion from the 2026 IMD World Competitiveness Ranking (WCR) is that many of the economies at the top of the table are not the most developed, nor the largest exporters, nor the largest markets. So what are they? Countries that respect the rule of law more consistently,” he concluded.