Labor Market MX

Modified

September 4, 2026

ENOE, INEGI · Quarterly, 2005–2026 · National

Official statistics from Mexico’s National Survey of Occupation and Employment (ENOE), public data from INEGI. Recomputed here from microdata using the institute’s own methodology (survey design, strata, and expansion factors, not a simple average) and checked against the original series INEGI publishes in its Banco de Información Económica. That check runs over every quarter back to 2005, not only the most recent one: the median gap is 0.013 percentage points and the largest is 0.216. Not an original finding: these are public figures, presented here for quick reference.

Start from a question:

The subutilization ladder

Unemployment above is the first step. These two widen the definition, one step at a time: first adding people available to work who aren’t actively searching, then people who already have a job but with fewer hours than they’d like.

Other indicators

Five more series, including the informality and informal-sector rates excluding agriculture.

All series above are original, without seasonal adjustment. The faint line behind each one is INEGI’s own trend-cycle series, shown as reading context; it is revised backward as new quarters arrive, so the figure quoted on each card always comes from the original series. Broader unemployment and labor underutilization have no quarterly trend-cycle series published by INEGI and appear without one.

How this is built

1. A validated pipeline, not a one-off script. The full computation — downloading each quarter directly from INEGI, harmonizing field names and weights across the ENOE/ENOE-N/ENOE regime changes since 2005, and applying the survey’s complex design (survey::svydesign, ids = upm, strata = est_d_tri, weights = fac_tri) — lives in a separate private R project, not in this site’s repository. The shaded band on each chart, and the ± figure next to each headline number, is a 95% confidence interval (±1.96 standard errors) from that same design, not a simple margin of error. Every rate above is checked against the original series INEGI publishes in its Banco de Información Económica, over the full history rather than only the latest quarter: the median gap is 0.013 percentage points and the largest is 0.216. Broader unemployment and labor underutilization have no matching series there and are reported as unvalidated on the quarterly update page.

2. This site only reads a public CSV. scripts/02-labor-indicators.R exports the national-level rates from that pipeline into data/labor-indicators.csv — nothing else. Re-run it with Rscript scripts/02-labor-indicators.R after the source pipeline updates, which happens once per quarter as INEGI publishes new microdata. All the code on this page — that script and the {ojs} that builds the charts — lives in the site’s repository.

3. The chart reads the CSV client-side. Plain FileAttachment(...).csv() and Observable Plot — no database engine, so nothing depends on a CDN beyond what Quarto already loads for Observable itself.