The Secretary of Economy, Ildefonso Guajardo Villarreal, delivered the keynote address "Young people, free trade and shared economy" at the opening of the school year at the Faculty of Economics at the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León (UANL, by its initials in Spanish).

The head of the Secretariuat of Economy (SE, by its initials in Spanish) said that, in these times, the new students have in mind a more entrepreneurial scheme, to create jobs, "and that's the most important dynamic that you are facing."

He also expressed that the new challenges of the public policy that will face the university "are based on a changing and dynamic scenario and with a technological revolution". That is why he made a calling so the young people that today begin their studies could be agents of change and transformation.

Guajardo Villarreal recalled that many graduates of this school joined the project of opening the Mexican economy as it was the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), "a negotiation that has been paradigmatic in the history of international trade, because economies of different levels of development faced themselves in order to integrate a free trade area."

He said that the agenda that have built the Presidents Enrique Peña Nieto and Barack Obama seeks ways to reduce transaction costs to improve the competitiveness, together, in North America, either in approval, trade facilitation or customs modernization to help improve the flows.

Commenting, on the keynote speech, about the Strategic Trans-Pacific Agreement of Economic Partnership (TPP), he said that they are working with the design of an active trade policy with Asia, because it is one of the continents that have had a higher economic growth in recent years. In the past few days, the Secretary of Economy concluded his participation at the Meeting of Trade Ministers of the TPP, held in Maui, Hawaii.

With regard to the Pacific Alliance (comprising Chile, Peru, Colombia and Mexico) he said that has definitely has established itself as a stable regional integration mechanism, dynamic and innovative, aimed at achieving an area of deep integration based on the free movement of goods, services, capital and people; it has become a platform for joint economic and trade integration and projection to the world, with special emphasis on the Asia Pacific.

He said that Mexico and the European Union are strategic partners, linked by a free trade agreement that has allowed the development of trade relations and investment, as well as the creation of jobs on both sides. It must be adapted to the new international economic reality. The modernization of this trade agreement should make it comparable with the new agreements negotiated by both Mexico and the EU.

He stressed that improving integration and expanding the integration to the south, with the countries that agree with us, expanding the ties with Asia, deepening them with Europe, we are making of Mexico one of the most interesting productive platforms in international trade.

The event was attended by Jesús Ancer Rodríguez, Rector of the UANL; the Director of the Faculty of Economics, Julio César Arteaga García; the Coordinator of Federal Delegations of the SE, Jorge Cantú Valderrama; and the Chief of the SE in Nuevo León, Enrique Martinez.