In spite of its economical potential, social inequality prevails in Mexico. During most of the last fifty years, except for the recurring crisis episodes in the 70s, 80s and 90s, Mexican society has continued to advance in terms of social indicators such as educational coverage, institutional strengthening, and economic modernization. However, unacceptable inequalities persist when it comes to competitiveness, income distribution, generation of wealth, informal economy, access to opportunities, political participation. There are also substantial gaps between regions, among men and women, and between indigenous and non indigenous population.
According to international compared data, in 2005 Mexico was situated among the countries with high human development (UNDP, 2006). In the same way, it was one of the Latin-American countries that showed the highest social and economic inequalities, in strong contrast with the dynamism and economic potential displayed through various decades. This contrast reveals that the achievements reached in macroeconomic terms and social indicators, doesn’t necessarily translate into substantial improvements when it comes to reducing inequality gaps in our country. A country’s growth and development do not happen in the abstract, it has a visible manifestation in its different regions and communities.
Economic growth has not come with a social development that impacts people’s quality of life; the persistence of poverty, particularly in Latin-American contexts, provides evidence of a fading phenomenon that has to be looked after by palliative public policy measures. Although the government programs against poverty have mitigated a few of the expressions of this social phenomenon, they haven’t substantially reduced it, due to the fact that poverty is firstly a sign of the inability of the economic system to substitute and adapt itself to the productive inclination and traditional ways of production, distribution and consumption in local societies; which have been destroyed or displaced without consideration of their social and spatial environment. In other words, poverty and inequality in Mexico are more than a momentary phenomenon or a simple “setback”, they are is a structural deficiency.
In consequence, the rupture of these local economic schemes has provoked secondary effects such as country-city migration, or the expulsion of the population towards the northern border. Poverty has been transformed into a phenomenon with an ever more urban face with distinctive features of segregation, public crime, informal employment, and a failure on the local government’s side to satisfy the growing demand for public services and goods and by doing so, putting pressure on public spending.
Furthermore, the collapse of the productive inclinations and the façade-style schemes to mitigate poverty, without attacking the problem at its root, has deepened the inability of the regions to increase their competitiveness. If we consider that competitiveness is related to the environment and to the sum of factors needed to promote an adequate climate for development and investment, it is of utmost importance to recognize that disregarding inequalities create a slower economic growth and sociopolitical instability.
The new public policies that combat poverty should consider it as a structural problem in order to create the self-sustainable production-distribution-consumption schemes at a local, communitarian or regional levels; attending historical productive inclinations, which are the sources of its own resources, where the poor can become leaders in such schemes, in an environment of cooperation between the local government and economic, political and social actors in that space.
