In one of the central axes of his campaign speech, Andrés Manuel López Obrador promised to get out of the neoliberal mediocrity of growth of 2% annual average in the 1983-2018 cycle and return the country to the 6% rate that the populist cycle 1934-1982 had. The real annual balance for the six-year term that is ending will be 1%.
What happened in the Lopez Obrador’s six-year term reflected the Limitation of the popular economic model with neoliberal macroeconomic stability: operating on relative price variables to keep manageable inflation below 3% annual average, but without modifying development policy. López Obrador’s fiscal strategy focused on inflation from the demand point of view, but he never wanted to delve deeper into the analysis of inflation as a structural-productive problem, a theory that was started back in the sixties by the Mexican economist Juan F. Noyola and that created the theory of structuralism as opposed to that of developmentalism.
The little that is known about the economic and development strategy of the virtual president-elect Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo Not only does it not break with the neoliberal restrictions of the fiscal policy of the six-year term that is ending, but it seems to surrender to the evidence that Mexico will never be a true economic power much beyond the export zone of primary products.
In your document 100 Steps to Transformation, Sheinbaum proposes the goal of an average of 3% of GDP per six-year period, half of the populist cycle and also half of the Lopez Obrador goal. The logic of the political system’s reasoning indicates that the goals of government campaign commitments are usually the maximum point of expectations, so the goal of 3% for the next six-year period will continue to keep Mexico at the level of mediocrity in job creation in the formal sector, where today 55% of workers participate in informal conditions or without social security benefits for job security.
The starting problem that the Sheinbaum government will have will be in the baton that it will receive from the López Obrador administration: a six-year term with 1% average annual real economic growthAnd since the economic figures are not final, the economic growth crisis in 2018-2024 will have to accumulate the promised and unachieved 6% per year, so a logical perception would be proposing a brutal effort to the economy in the next six-year period beyond 3% to recover part of what was lost.
The Mexican economy The country has had two serious setbacks before: the 0% average annual growth during the six-year term of Miguel de la Madrid from 1983 to 1988 and the stumble of the six-year term of Zedillo due to the crisis of 1994-1995. The loss of well-being of citizens in those two crises has not yet been recovered, and now we have to add the 0% growth of the six-year term that is ending.
Politicians often justify their approaches based on current events: Lopez Obrador promised 6% average annual GDPknowing that previous crises would have required rates of 12% or more, because annual growth only covered the situation of the previous year and the current one. The losses in welfare are cumulative.
The next government’s average annual growth rate of 3% will not get the country out of the socioeconomic crisis, which is further aggravated by unequal structures of income and wealth distribution and fiscal policies that are not sufficient to finance welfare programs that impact the standard of living of the marginalized.
The López Obrador government received the inequality structure with overwhelming figures: 80% of Mexicans with one to five social restrictions and only 20% without problems of arrears or needs; the inheritance to his successor will be practically the same, perhaps with a couple of points below and not sustainable, but with a wealth distribution structure that reflects the workers’ salaries: 55% in an informal situation and 75% with incomes of one to three minimum wages that are insufficient to fulfill that formal commitment of President Luis Echeverría in his six-year term to achieve a remunerative salary, that is, sufficient for the well-being of a family.
Expectations are low for well-being: the Bank of Mexico has considered an average annual GDP rate of only 2% for the next ten years, from 2025 to 2034. And adjusting the low level expected for 2024 and 2025, President Sheinbaum’s goal of 3% could be reduced to 2.5%, almost in the range of the last forty years.
These data conclude that if there is no modernizing socioeconomic development model, Mexico will remain in the mediocrity of GDP and tied to the stabilizing conditionalities of the IMF.
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