The Mexican Financial Department on Wednesday estimated that Mexico's economy is expected to grow by 3 percent over last year in the first quarter of 2007 after a record high growth in 2006.

Miguel Messmacher, the department's head of economic planning, said that it is too early to make an upward forecast for the first quarter or the whole of 2007.

Mexico's gross domestic product (GDP) grew by 4.8 percent in 2006, recording the fastest growth of the country's economy in six years, the Finance Department said on Tuesday.

The 2006 growth estimate is based on the 4.8 percent forecast that Mexico's central bank released last Friday in its first monetary policy statement of the year.

In 2006, higher oil and tax revenue contributed to a 21.65 billion-peso (about 1.96 billion U.S. dollars) budget surplus, which amounts to 0.23 percent of GDP and the first surplus since 1996, said the Finance Department in a news release on Tuesday.

A total of 880,000 jobs were created in the formal economy in 2006, the most ever for a single year, and the average unemployment rate was around 3.6 percent, unchanged from 2005, said the Finance Department.

Based on the data of last October and November, the fourth-quarter GDP growth is estimated to be above 4.3 percent year-on-year. The National Statistics Institute is scheduled to release the fourth-quarter GDP data on Feb. 16.

Source: Xinhua