World Bank Report: With AMLO, Mexico is the economy with the lowest growth in Latin America

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In its Global Economic Perspectives report, the World Bank points out that this will be a lost six-year term for Mexico in terms of GDP growth. The data indicates that there will be a decline in per capita income and that this will be the government that will leave the worst economic results since the administration of Miguel de la Madrid.

MEXICO CITY (Proceso).– The World Bank (WB) is the first multilateral organization to expose an economic x-ray of the six-year term of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, not only because of the results presented during the first four years of government –in which there were an economic decline of -0.9%–, but because it projects a modest recovery for 2023 and 2024.

According to the data and projections of the WB Global Economic Perspectives report, released this month, the president who as a candidate promised annual economic growth of 4% on average will fall far short of that goal, since during his government the country will grow less than half a point each year, just 0.38%.

In this way, the six-year term of López Obrador will be the one with the lowest economic performance for 36 years, when during the debt crisis the government of Miguel de la Madrid (1983-1988) left a GDP growth of only 0.33 % annual average.

In this six-year term, the Mexican economy will also be the one with the worst performance in Latin America. There is no other Latin American country in the WB report –in which Venezuela does not appear “due to a lack of reliable data”- with growth as low in the period as Mexico.

The president usually blames the covid-19 pandemic for the poor economic results, but the fact is that all the nations of Latin America, like the rest of the world, suffered this calamity, and even so, all of them grew more than Mexico and, unlike this country, they have already managed to recover their pre-pandemic GDP.

According to the WB data and projections, between 2019 and 2024 the Brazilian economy will grow, in percentage points, 3.8 times more than the Mexican economy; Argentina, 3.3 times more, and Guatemala eight times more.

Even the GDP of Nicaragua, a country subjected to sanctions due to the repression and dictatorial measures of Daniel Ortega, will accumulate a growth of 13.4% in the period 2019-2024, five times more than Mexico, which has not managed to recover the economic level pre-pandemic.

For the economist Héctor Nájera Catalán, two factors help explain Mexico’s economic lag this six-year term: the drop in public and private investment and López Obrador’s decision not to implement fiscal stimulus policies with the greatest impact during the pandemic.

He points out that the difference between Mexico and the rest of Latin America is that while the governments of the region allocated massive sums of money to reactivate the economy in 2020, the most critical year of the crisis caused by covid-19, López Obrador opted for a policy of containment of public spending, which it was a very neoliberal gamble.

According to data from the International Monetary Fund, Mexico was the Latin American country that allocated the fewest resources – barely the equivalent of 0.7% of GDP – to fiscal stimulus measures aimed at reactivating the economy and supporting families and companies during the pandemic.

Source: Proseso