• Earlier this week, the association that represents the interests of some of the most important oil service providers in Mexico asked state company Pemex to pay overdue debts totalling 103.6Bn pesos ($5.1Bn).
• Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said on Thursday that the debt burden accumulated by state energy company Pemex with suppliers would be reviewed and various payment mechanisms are being studied and refined.
• Pemex has a financial debt of $97.3Bn and owes service providers another $20.5 billion. Despite efforts to reduce debt under Sheinbaum's predecessor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the company remains one of the world's most indebted energy companies.
• "A review is being carried out, which is normal," President Sheinbaum said during her regular news conference, without giving details.
• Under the six-year administration of Sheinbaum, who took office on Oct. 1, Pemex will seek to maintain average crude oil production of 1.8Mn barrels per day, but its debt burden is making that challenging.

(Source: Reuters)

• Brazil's labour market is posting blockbuster numbers ahead of a central bank rate decision next week, amid bets that the country's rate-setting committee will need to speed up monetary tightening due to inflationary risks.
• Brazil's jobless rate fell to 6.4% in the three months through September, statistics agency IBGE said on Thursday, October 31, below market expectations and marking the second-lowest unemployment level on record.
• The jobless rate was down from 6.9% in the April through June period and from 7.7% a year earlier, according to IBGE (the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics). Economists polled by Reuters had projected an unemployment rate of 6.5%. That comes after data released on Wednesday showed that Latin America's largest economy created a net 247,818 formal jobs in September, the most since February and above analysts' estimates of a net 227,600.
• However, the fact that Brazil's jobless rate has been hovering around historically low levels, and that job creation keeps surprising to the upside, is fueling market fears that the tight labour market could trigger inflationary pressures.
• "This improvement takes place in a delicate macroeconomic environment, where inflation and the cost of credit may require a more intense response from the central bank in adjustments to the interest rate," Jefferson Laatus, chief strategist at Laatus Group, said. "Especially if the increase in the number of workers puts pressure on consumption and makes controlling inflation difficult."
• Last month, the central bank hiked its interest rate for the first time in more than two years, delivering a 25 basis-point increase of 10.75%.
• Market participants have fully priced in an acceleration in monetary tightening, with a 96% chance of a 50 basis-point increase at the central bank's rate-setting committee's meeting on November 6. The remaining 4% probability is of an even larger increase of 75 basis points.

(Source: Reuters)

• Barbados Prime Minister, Mia Mottley, has welcomed her country's inclusion in this year's Global Innovation Index (GII), eight years after it had been listed in the publication that ranks world economies according to their innovation capabilities.
• 'For the first time in eight years Barbados is included in this important index, which serves to identify the progress countries have made in creating a culture of innovation, highlights the levers that must be pulled to further transform, and allows us to measure what matters,' Mottley said in a video message to the unveiling of the 17th edition by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), the Geneva-based international agency focused on global intellectual property issues.
• Mottley said: 'As a small island developing state on the frontlines of the climate crisis, and incredibly sensitive to the impact of geopolitical and economic shocks, we in Barbados and the wider global majority are by our very nature innovative.'
• Prime Minister Mottley said her government is committed to investing in its people, noting that 'we are committed to building the kind of education, business and investment ecosystem that will make the small size of our land space almost irrelevant. 'As we invest in our people, our potential for transformative growth becomes endless, [and] one of the most important areas of investment for Barbados has indeed, always been education,' she said.
• Barbados ranked 77th among the 133 economies featured in the Global Innovation Index (GII) 024, with Switzerland, Sweden, the United States, Singapore, and the United Kingdom, ranked as the world's most innovative economies.
• Barbados's ranking is considered impressive, given the gathering of the necessary statistical data, which began a few months ago. It was noted that Barbados performed above regional and Latin American countries (Jamaica – 79^th, Panama – 82^nd, the Dominican Republic – 97^th, and Trinidad and Tobago – 108^th) in the indicators of institutions, human capital and research, business sophistication, knowledge, and technology outputs.

(Sources: Trinidad Express Newspaper & NCBCM Research)