Inegi faces a new challenge with digital commerce

On January 25th, 1983, the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (Inegi, by its acronym in Spanish) was born, which, according to its president, Graciela Márquez Colín, "over four decades, has not only become a beacon for the political, academic, and administrative navigation of the country, but also positioned itself as a valuable ally to meet the old and new needs of Mexican society”.

Today, more than 40 years after its creation, and facing the constant development of technologies, Inegi is facing a new challenge: digital commerce.

Marco Antonio Chapa Martínez, who has been the state coordinator of Inegi in Tamaulipas since August 1992, describes how the way of collecting commercial information has been changing.

"Two or three decades ago, it was easy to know about commercial activity, the buying and selling of goods in a specific region. We went to those units where products are sold, asked for information about the volume of sales of a certain product, asked about the quantities regarding existing products, and had the information.

"Today, it is not like that anymore. To capture the buying and selling of goods anywhere in the country, you need to add electronic commerce, that is, the use of platforms in the acquisition of goods," he explained.

He stated that, with the application of new mechanisms, procedures, and collaboration agreements with digital commerce companies, Inegi has sought to address this new reality.

"The addition of new technologies, the new forms of organization in terms of economic activity, all this evolution has forced us, through trials, statistical tests, among others, to modify the methods for capturing information.

"To be able to know about the buying and selling of goods in Ciudad Victoria or Tamaulipas, for example, it is no longer possible to only visit the economic units within that territory you want to investigate, but to have access to distance trade information," he added.

On the other hand, Chapa Martinez detailed the work they do with the public administration, which gained relevance since April 16th, 2008, when the Decree was published in the Official Gazette of the Federation, which issues the Law of the National System of Statistical and Geographic Information, which regulates Section B of Article 26 of the Political Constitution of the United Mexican States, which establishes that the Mexican State will have a National System of Statistical and Geographic Information (SNIEG, by its acronym in Spanish).

"With the modification of the constitutional article, it obliges the authorities to take the SNIEG as a basis for the elaboration of national and state development plans.

"In that sense, what we have been doing since that date is approaching federal, state, and municipal authorities, through various mechanisms, mainly collaboration agreements, with which we provide them with information from the system. We train them, advise them on the use and exploitation of data," he said.

How Inegi operates

Marco Antonio Chapa detailed that, to fulfill the function of capturing national statistical and geographic information, "practically forces us to have a presence throughout the country, in each of the areas where economic activity takes place, where a demographic phenomenon, such as a birth, occurs."

"At the national level, we are composed of 10 regional directorates, and in these 10 directorates, the 32 states are grouped, in this case, 32 state coordinations. Tamaulipas belongs to the northeast regional directorate," he commented.

In the case of Tamaulipas, he said, it has its headquarters in the capital, but practically half of the population, economic activity, is in the border area, where they have three local offices: Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa, and Matamoros.

Mexico, at the forefront of statistical and geographical information

The state coordinator of Inegi in Tamaulipas highlighted Mexico's leadership in the field of statistical and geographical information.

"Practically, in all countries of the world, there are entities that generate statistical information and entities that generate geographical information, and they are different and coexist. Only in two countries does a single entity gather the areas that generate statistical and geographical information into one, which is the case of Mexico and Brazil.

"The advantage of having these two functions allows us to georeference a statistical data point in space. This is extremely useful for understanding the country."