Even though the economy It is the axis of the entire articulation of the Republic, presidential candidatesmedia ecosystem and society itself have been oblivious to the development scenario for the next sexennium: the expectations of GDP growth for the next 10 years –Banxico dixit– are 2% annual average, equal to that of the entire neoliberal cycle 1983-2024, and lower than the necessary rate of 6% that is required to recover what was lost and advance in the attention to social needs.
Given this evidence, politicians and rulers They don't want to understand that economy is at the bottom of booms and crises and that understandings between parties depend on productive balances between businessmen and workers. The economic boom of the populist cycle 1934-2012 was a product of the control of social conflict by the State, but with development policies based on industrialization.
The presidential candidates and of course the more than 100 thousand candidates for more than 20 thousand public positions are seeking the popular vote through the promise of gifted money that is not actually taken as social policy because it does not modify the classification of classes and they are only allocations budgetary measures that neither stimulate nor multiply economic activity.
The candidate López Obrador promised a GDP growth rate of 6% for his six-year term 2018-2024, but the final accounting could be 1.1% annual average; and if the pandemic can be blamed for the GDP of -8.6% in 2020, the average rate of 3.8% in the period 2021-2024 did not actually reflect a productive economic reactivation, but only the rebound of 2020.
The official candidate Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo has established, without any reasoning or substantive diagnosis, an average six-year GDP rate of 5%, and without clearly offering a true programmatic National Development Plan. But annual economic growth will not leave the mediocre range of 2% if the same declining industrial policy, the Government's budgetary priority of unproductive social spending and the lack of economic triggers continue.
The problem with the economic policy of the López Obrador Government was not in the pandemic, but in the dilemma of social spending vis-à-vis productive spending; That is to say, the public budget was allocated to unproductive welfare spending and to the flagship works of the federal government that only impacted employment and well-being in the areas surrounding their construction and with very little effect on productive chains.
The lesson left by the development strategy of the López Obrador Government can serve its advanced successor Sheinbaum to face and resolve the development dilemma of her six-year term: maintain the existence of a State as a productive sector of itself and above the private sector or use public resources for infrastructure programs that strengthen the private industrial and agricultural sector. If the López Obrador line of flagship works of the State is maintained in the next six-year term, development expectations will remain stagnant at figures of 2% annual average of GDP.
When the Ministry of Finance presented the National Development Program based on a programmatic structure to President López Obrador in 2019, the Executive's decision was to throw it in the trash and instead impose a National Development Plan legally and in the Official Gazette. Dogmatic development, based on social and ideological commitments, but without any truly industrial and agricultural development strategy.
The private industrial sector was left spinning the wheel behind the carrot of alleged short-term anti-cyclical programs with specific sectors to detonate, but the government lacked money because the entire budget collected went to pay the very high cost of canceling projects. of the Peña Nieto Government, to finance welfare subsidies without any productive multiplier potential and to consolidate around five major flagship works of the regime that swallowed up the budget and their economic multiplier effect will not be enough to turn them into detonators of productive economic activity.
In the absence of a real development policy proposal from the advanced candidate Sheinbaum, the country faces at least two years of business productive sluggishness because businessmen will not invest money if the State does not return to its role as detonator of national development. The warning has already been registered by the International Monetary Fund: the expected GDP for this year of 2024 will be 2.4% and will drop to 1.4% in 2025, a warning that does not find sensitivity in the official candidate.
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