The effect of natural gas shortages on the Mexican economy

The Mexican economy experienced a shortage of natural gas from the second quarter of 2012 through the second half of 2013. In order to deal with this problem, the state-owned national supplier of natural gas (Pemex) implemented a system that restricts the amount of natural gas used by the manufacturing sector. With this information, we have constructed a “shortage index” that represents the percentage of natural gas restricted per month in each region. We quantify the effect of natural gas shortages on the manufacturing sector and GDP using a panel data model with state and time fixed effects. We estimate that the natural gas shortage reduced Mexican GDP annual growth rate by 0.28 percentage points in the second quarter of 2013.