Slow growth in the Mexican economy

The goal of this paper is to test alternative explanations of slow growth in the Mexican economy. There are two groups of explanations: The first, closer to the government's position, considers the cause to be the lack of completion of structural reforms, in particular: liberalization of the labor market and foreign investment, and full privatization of the oil sector. The second, proposed by academics and independent economic research centers underlines the negative effect of the neoliberal fiscal and monetary policy applied in the Mexican economy for the past thirty years. In the academic debate held by this second group of economists there is a belief that, directly or indirectly, poverty and the income concentration are related to Mexico's weak growth performance. This article, grounded in post Keynesian and Kaleckian theory, uses econometric models to provide evidence that the principal cause of the slow growth of the Mexican economy is income concentration, and concludes that the strategy of neoliberal policies applied in the past thirty years have been self-defeating: By favoring corporate profits and high income classes, it neglected the domestic market and social welfare. The result is that the growth capacity of domestic effective demand has deteriorated, which explains the low level of the national growth rate.