The National Commission on Minimum Wages minimum wages published general and professional governing from November 27, 2012, according to the geographical areas of Mexico.

The decision issued Monday in the Official Journal of the Federation states that general wages will be for the region "A" of 63.33 pesos to the area and "B" of 59.08 pesos.

Meanwhile, minisalarios professionals, including 70 professions or trades, fluctuate between 77.79 and 186.73 pesos for the area "A" and between 73.84 and 176.72 for the "B".

The document states that the geographic area "A" consists of Baja California, Baja California Sur, Guerrero, Chihuahua, Mexico City, Jalisco, Estado de Mexico, Nuevo Leon, Sonora, Tamaulipas, and Veracruz.

Meanwhile, the area "B" comprises Aguascalientes, Campeche, Coahuila, Colima, Chiapas, Durango, Guanajuato, Hidalgo, Michoacán, Morelos, Nayarit, Oaxaca, Puebla, Queretaro, Quintana Roo, San Luis Potosi, Sinaloa, Tabasco, Tlaxcala, Yucatan and Zacatecas.

The agreement adds that minimum wages professionals for professionals, trades and special works governed from November 27, 2012, as cash minimum normal working day and will work according to the office area and performing.

Retail sales during Mexico's "Buen Fin" campaign at stores that have been open for at least a year rose nearly 30 percent over last year, on strong sales of general merchandise, clothes and shoes, a retailers' association said on Sunday.

"Buen Fin," which took place from November 16-19, is a campaign to boost consumer spending that was launched in 2011 with government and private sector support.

It is modeled on the United States' "Black Friday," which is the day after the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday in November and aims to draw shoppers with discounts before the gift-giving Christmas holiday.

According to a survey by the National Association of Supermarkets and Department (ANTAD), Mexican consumers spent $25.5 billion pesos during this year's campaign.

This year's take represents a 29.9 percent increase over last year for stores that have been open for at least 12 months, and a 36.5 percent increase for stores over all.

While the global slowdown has begun to drag on some sectors of Mexico's economy, consumer spending has shown strength.

Mexican retail sales rose more than expected in September, damping fears that a spike in inflation might drag down consumer spending.

Mexican consumer confidence also rebounded in October after slumping for two months.

To prevent taxi drivers who work outside of Puerto Vallarta International Airport,

The Apple iPad mini feels like the youngest kid in the family that inherits the hand me downs from the older siblings. It has the camera resolution of the iPhone 4, the processor, a Dual core A5 chip, from the iPhone 4S and the screen resolution from its older brothers the iPad 1 and 2.

It’s only 7.2 mm thick and weighs a little over a half a pound, which is just a little heavier than an apple, the actual fruit that is. Weighing only .68 lbs, I’d personally like to have a cover that protects it a little better and maybe adds a little weight to it—it’s so light that it feels delicate.

Many people were disappointed by the screen resolution of only 1024 x 768, including me, but the fact that the pixels are smaller, makes this screen more than appropriate for reading, watching videos and playing games.
No retina display for the iPad mini

I know that the world was expecting the retina display with the mini but, we need to get over it, we’re going to need to wait six months for the next generation to be satisfied—for a while anyway.

The front camera is HD and the back camera has a resolution of five megapixels for photos and 108 0p for HD video.

Of course, you can run the gazillion apps that were already optimized for iPad and this is part of the selling proposition. That number is actually closer to 275,000 apps—which is mind-boggling.

Apple is touting their great browsing experience with the mini that’s a product of the actual success of the iPad itself, it’s no coincidence that they have sold over 100 million traditional iPads. The experience is consistent and they are leveraging that humongous footprint into an advantage for the mini.

I’ve used it now for a few days and the real question is…would I use it for work? I have and even though it takes some getting used to, I’m honestly not complaining. The battery life is not disappointing at 10 hours, which will easily get you through a workday and overall, it’s the same product we are already used to… just smaller.

Following the dialogue between business and policy makers, the G20 Trade and Investment Promotion Summit 2012 concluded a successful two-day event on November 6 with a promising agenda and determined next steps.

Under an environment of close cooperation and discussion between agencies, the following five strategic challenges were identified:

1. Strong emphasis on policy coherence and sustainable development are more than ever needed due to: a) the emergence of the new global economic landscape characterized by the relevant link between trade and investment, b) the rapid evolution of global value chains in scope, scale and depth, and; c) the shift of trade and investment promotion paradigm.

2. Existing constrains of public funding for trade and investment promotion, and strong desire for working on customized trade promotion optimization (TPO) and investment promotion agency (IPA) country solutions while fostering international peer cooperation and learning.

3. Need for local small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to access and benefit from global value chains (GVCs).

4. Include private business in the economic development strategy-making process.

5. Missing fast-moving networks for best practice exchange integrating trade and investment.

At the inauguration ceremony and plenary session, executives from the organizing committee provided an overview and positioning of the Summit, including the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC)'s executive director of policy and business practices Stefano Bertasi and welcoming remarks by ProMexico's CEO Carlos Guzman Bonfill. The World Trade Organization (WTO)'s chief of staff Arancha Gonzalez Laya spoke about the changing landscape of trade, where she highlighted the need to focus on global value chains to further trade and investment around the world, and later on the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD)'s director for investment and enterprise division James Zhan discussed the key trends and strategic challenges global investment is facing nowadays.

Following a series of closed-door roundtables, key representatives offered a wrap up press conference where they presented the key strategic challenges listed above as conclusions for the summit. Key representatives speaking to members of the press included ProMexico's CEO Carlos Guzman Bonfill, UNCTAD's James Zhan, and OCDE's chief of staff and sherpa to the G20 Gabriela Ramos.

Alejandro Ramirez, CEO of Cinepolis and B20 chair, also attended the event, where he provided closing remarks and conclusions on a closed door session. In an exclusive interview with MexicoToday, Ramirez stated, "The G20 Trade and Investment Promotion Summit was one of the recommendations we presented at the B20 Summit in Los Cabos which recommended all trade and investment promotion agencies to get together to share best practices and analyze ways how business and government can work closer to advance free trade and investment, and put pressure on G20 countries at a time of growing protectionist threats." Ramirez also added, "This event allowed trade and investment promotion agencies to understand the importance of global value chains, and to analyze ways they can help, especially to small and medium enterprises, in having access to those global value chains which will make them more competitive, resulting on their countries to become more competitive."

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

    NEW: Economist Intelligence Unit ranks Singapore high on "where-to-be-born" list
    Nearly half of 15 former Soviet republics trail Singapore as "emotionless" in Gallup survey
    Singapore boasts a 1.9% jobless rate, high per capita GDP
    Philippines, meanwhile, registers as most emotional nation

Hong Kong (CNN) -- The most emotionless society is Singapore's despite its reputation for being among the world's richest, a new survey has revealed.

Gallup looked at 150 countries where about 1,000 residents were asked whether they experienced five positive and five negative emotions a lot during the course of a day. The results were based on interviews taken over a three-year period.

Questions included whether people felt well-rested or enjoyment, smiled and laughed or felt worry, sadness, stress or anger.

The 36% in Singapore who reported feeling anything is the lowest in the world, the Washington-based research and analytics organization found. This figure is an aggregation of data from 2009-2011; in Gallup's latest measure taken last year, just 30% of those surveyed in Singapore felt anything at all.

The findings belie Singapore's 1.9% jobless rate in the third quarter and per capita GDP of more than US$50,000 -- among the highest in the world.

"The implications for an emotionless society are significant," wrote Jon Clifton, a partner at Gallup and director of the Gallup Government Group. "To continue to be competitive in today's world, Singapore must begin focusing on behavioral-based indicators that move beyond GDP.

"The bottom line is that Singaporeans are productive, highly disciplined citizens who are not enjoying their lives much," he wrote in an accompanying article for the Gallup Business Journal. "This culture has won historically, but it will not move to the next level until its leadership takes wellbeing seriously."

Trailing right behind Singapore were nearly half of the 15 former Soviet republics: Georgia and Lithuania, with 37%; and Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, with 38%.

Tying at 38% were Madagascar and Nepal.

The Philippines, meanwhile, registered as the most emotional nation, with 60% of those interviewed responding "yes" to experiencing a lot of feelings daily.
The bottom line is that Singaporeans are productive, highly disciplined citizens who are not enjoying their lives much
Jon Clifton, partner at Gallup

Also scoring high were Latin American nations, with 10 of its nations -- led by El Salvador -- sharing top spots with Bahrain, Oman, Canada and the United States.

Absent from the list is Bhutan, whose 4th king first coined the term "Gross National Happiness," declaring in 1972 that it was more important than Gross National Product.

The country now has a Gross National Happiness (GNH) Commission with a mandate to pursue that objective.

The country's latest GNH Index measures happiness based on 33 indicators grouped among nine domains: psychological wellbeing, health, time use, education, cultural diversity and resilience, good governance, community vitality, ecological diversity and resilience, and living standards.

Reflecting the growing need to address happiness, The Earth Institute at Columbia University published the first ever World Happiness Report commissioned for the U.N. Conference on Happiness in April. It reviews the state of happiness in the world today, the causes of happiness and misery, and policy implications.

The report was in answer to a resolution adopted last year by the U.N. General Assembly declaring "the pursuit of happiness is a fundamental human goal" embodying the spirit of the 2015 Millennium Development Goals. This year the U.N. declared March 20 of each year as the International Day of Happiness.

Last month the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, which represents 34 countries, dedicated its fourth forum in New Delhi, India, to measuring well-being. The OECD's Better Life Index compares well-being across countries based on 11 topics identified as essential.

It's another indication that there's more to life or success than wealth, and that measuring a nation on GDP alone can go only so far.

Still, the Economist Intelligence Unit has named Singapore one of the best countries to be born in 2013.

Ranked sixth on an index topped by Switzerland, Singapore was cited along with Hong Kong, ranked 10th, as being "well-known for their wealth, stability and relatively low levels of corruption," said Susan Evans, an analyst.

"One determining factor of future life satisfaction for their residents, which is less easy to predict, will be the trajectory of civil freedoms," she added in a press release.

The index looked at as many as 11 indicators, including GDP per head, life expectancy at birth, quality of family life, the state of political freedoms, job security, climate, safety, community life, governance and gender equality.

Among the 80 countries covered, Nigeria ranked last.

The current government of Jalisco which ends on February 28 next, rejected the possibility of re-promote or authorize a weight increase in the rate of urban buse in Jalisco.

There is a dirty little secret about economics writing. The thing that offers the surest path to glory to front page play for a story, to lots of Web traffic, to a pat on the back from editors is doom and gloom. When we can point out something that is awful, whether it is a collapsing job market or rising poverty or skyrocketing gasoline prices, the world seems a whole lot more interested in what we have to say. It’s not for nothing they call economics the dismal science.

But Thursday is the day each year Americans set aside to give thanks for what they have, to bask in the good around them. So for Thanksgiving, this economics writer decided to cast aside the usual practice, fire up FRED (a database of economic statistics maintained by the St. Louis Fed), and keep looking until I found five economic trends that are unambiguously positive.

These are the things that Americans have to be grateful for in these times of economic challenge:

— Household debt is way down. For the quarter-century leading up to the great recession at the start of 2008, Americans accumulated ever-larger piles of debt, both in absolute terms and relative to the size of the economy. Home mortgages were the largest portion of that, but it also included credit cards, auto loans, and student loan debt. The good news is that in the past three years, Americans have made remarkable progress cleaning up their balance sheets and paying down those debts. After peaking at nearly 98 percent of economic output at the start of 2009, the household debt was down to 83 percent of GDP in the spring of 2012. That represents debt reduction of $636 billion, or more than $2,000 for every man, woman and child. It should be noted that some of the decline came about because of debt being written down (such as in mortgage foreclosures), not paid off. But the simple fact is that excessive household debt played a major role getting us into this mess; we’re well on our way toward fixing it.

— The cost of servicing that debt is way, way down. Not only do American families owe less money than they did a few years ago, the price of maintaining that debt is much lower than it once was. In late 2007, debt service payments added up to a whopping 14 percent of disposable personal income. Now it’s down to 10.7 percent, about the same as in the early 1990s. That reflects both Americans reducing their debt burdens (see above), and ultra-low interest rate policies from the Federal Reserve that has reduced the rates paid on debts that remain. Translation: It costs Americans $403 billion less, or about $1,300 per person, to make their debt payments than it would if debt service costs were still at their 2007 ratio.

— Electricity and natural gas prices are falling. Americans who cook or heat their homes with natural gas are seeing big savings, thanks to falling prices for the fuel: The retail price for consumers’ gas service piped into their homes is down 8.4 percent in the year ended in October. The lower wholesale price of natural gas is also pulling down electricity prices; they are off 1.2 percent over the past year. Since these are both utility costs that people can’t control much in the short-run, that translates directly into more disposable income for Americans to use for everything else they want or need to buy. And in percentage terms, it is most helpful for the middle income and poor, who spend a greater proportion of their income on basic energy needs. For a lower middle-income family making between $19,000 and $35,000, that comes to about $43 in savings.

— Businesses aren’t firing people. The job market has been underwhelming in the economic recovery that officially began more than three years ago, and unemployment remains high at 7.9 percent. But there is some hidden good news in the jobs numbers. While businesses aren’t adding new workers at a pace that would put the hordes of unemployed back on the job very rapidly, they also aren’t slashing jobs at a very rapid clip. Private employers laid off or discharged 1.62 million people in September, according to the Labor Department’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover data. That may sound like a lot, but it’s near the lowest level in the decade the data goes back. During the depths of the recession, employers were slashing more than 2 million jobs a month. And even during 2006, which was in theory a good year for the economy, employers slashed an average of 1.66 million workers a month, more than they are now. It is a sign that even though employers aren’t adding jobs in large numbers, they also are reasonably happy with the workers they have and are not dismissing workers in unusually large numbers. It’s a good time if you already have a job.

— Housing is dramatically more affordable. People often speak as if higher home prices are an unambiguously good thing, but that can be misleading. Sure, a retiree looking to sell off a large house and live in a small condo instead benefits from high home prices. But most everyone else is either better off when buying a home is more affordable rather than less. But to put some more concrete numbers on this idea, I made a simple model to look at what a typical American family would actually have to pay to buy a house over time. Assuming the person took out a 30-year fixed rate mortgage at the prevailing rate in an amount 80 percent of the median home sales price across the country (meaning that they put 20 percent down, allowing them access to low, “conforming” mortgage rates). In the spring of 2006, that typical American home buyer would have faced a monthly mortgage payment of $1,247 a month, or a whopping 41 percent of the monthly average wages of private sector workers. But in the six years since then, home prices have fallen, so have mortgage rates, and wages have risen with inflation. Add it all up, and in the spring of 2012 that median American house would require a mortgage payment of only $889 a month, which is 26 percent of the average private sector employee’s pay. For workers just starting out, young families, or those looking to buy a bigger place, that is hard to beat.

NEW DEAL: The United States and Mexico are rewriting rules on how to share water from the Colorado River, capping a five-year effort to form a united front against future drought in their western states.

GIVE AND TAKE: Mexico gains rights to put some of its river water in Lake Mead, which stretches across Nevada and Arizona, giving it badly needed storage capacity, and it will forfeit some of its share of the river during shortages, bringing itself in line with western U.S. states.

DOLLARS FOR WATER: Water agencies in California, Arizona and Nevada also will buy water from Mexico, which will use some of the money to upgrade its infrastructure.

Grupo Bimbo, a Mexican company that is the world's largest bread baker,

Sherwin-Williams Co (SHW.N), the top U.S. paint maker, said it will buy Mexico's leading paint company Consorcio Comex for about $2.34 billion, including debt, to tap into the rising demand in the region.

Shares of Sherwin-Williams were up 7 percent at $151.05 on the New York Stock Exchange on Monday.

The deal will significantly increase Sherwin-Williams' presence in markets where its store count is low, Chief Executive Christopher Connor said in a statement.

"There's an estimated housing deficit in the range of 9 million units, plus ongoing annual demand of 600,000 units, in Mexico," Connor said on a conference call. "So it's a pretty healthy market."

Sherwin-Williams has 135 stores in Mexico.

The U.S. company noted that 40 percent of Mexico's population is aged between 10 and 44, pointing to the strong growth potential in housing demand.

Comex, which sells paint and coatings through 3,300 outlets in Mexico, generated sales of about $1.4 billion in 2011.

About $1 billion of this comes from Mexico, Robert W. Baird & Co analyst Ghansham Panjabi said.

Comex acquisition will also boost Sherwin-Williams' presence in the U.S. West Coast and Canada.

"Coatings is still a consolidating industry. This is just a part of a natural consolidation cycle," Panjabi said.

GOOD FIT

Comex was founded as a family business in the 1950s by Jose Achar, a descendent of Syrian immigrants, who started mixing paints in a garage in Mexico City using a World War One mill.

The company is now the top paint manufacturer in Mexico and Central America.

"Sherwin Williams is obviously one of the leaders globally and they just found a very nice fit with a well-managed company," Panjabi said.

Sherwin-Williams, which sells Dutch Boy, Krylon, Minwax, Water Seal and its namesake brands, operates about 3,880 stores in the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico and Virgin Islands.

The company, which has a market value of about $14.5 billion, expects the deal to add modestly to earnings in the first year and more than $1 per share by the third year.

From November 16 to 21 enterprises