Politics: Words, deeds and budgets

MEXICO - Report 16 Sep 2019 by Guillermo Valdes, Alejandro Hope Pinsón and Francisco González

If a government wants to assure that it will deliver on the promises it has made, it has to come up with budgets that are in keeping with such commitments to the public. But when we look at the federal government’s revenue and spending budgets for 2020, there appear to be a series of disconnects between promises the authorities continue to make and the funds the government proposes allocating to those ends. Or perhaps the lack of budgetary congruence we are witnessing hides some non-explicit budgetary priorities.

This is especially true when it comes to what the president and his minister of finance have publicly declared to be the three priorities guiding the choices they made when drafting next year’s federal spending budget: promoting social well-being, strengthening Pemex and improving public security. This week we narrow our focus to the social and security budgets and will take up other aspects of budgetary priorities and content in next week’s Outlook.

The government did opt to raise by 11% the budget of the Ministry of Well-being, which oversees some of the priority projects for the least-advantaged members of Mexican society, but it made very slight increases to next year’s funding of the ministries of education and health, two other areas central to the government’s social policy priorities, a dichotomy that suggests funding choices are influenced by political (read clientelist) considerations. And although greater relative weight was assigned to well-being or developmental programs vis-à-vis spending on healthcare and education, the government is not proposing any substantial increase in well-being programs that might otherwise lead one to believe that they will significantly lower poverty or inequality.

Perhaps more troubling is the extent to which the government has taken big reductions to programs related to what most Mexicans regard as the greatest problem facing their communities and the nation as a whole: public security. In fact, overall spending on public security and justice is being scaled back to levels of 2013.

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