Book Report on Mexico in the Path of Development
In his book, Mexico in the Path of Development, Enrique de la Madrid Cordero’s thesis states that Mexico has the potential to become a fully developed country in the lapse of a generation. He presents a comprehensive examination of Mexico’s strengths, achievements, challenges, and barriers to growth. According to De La Madrid Cordero, Mexico has reached sufficient achievements in a multitude of areas, such as education, health, employment, housing, infrastructure, and democracy. He is highly assertive on the subject of Mexico’s economic growth over the last thirty years being “inconsistent and mediocre”1 De La Madrid Cordero focuses exclusively on three factors which he considers to be Mexico’s most significant barriers to growth: the lack of penetration and financial inclusion, the deficient level of economic competition and the low level of productivity. Overall, De La Madrid Cordero promotes and encourages citizen participation to spur Mexico to move forward and achieve global development.
By rethinking the competitive advantages and identifying obstacles, it is possible to
understand why Mexico’s current government-driven reforms, with the support of their major parties, are the necessary measures to conclude the nation’s transformation in an international environment. These reforms can offer Mexico an extraordinary opportunity to eliminate these obstacles and ensure that the nation grows at an average rate of 5 percent per year, over the next 25 years, to reach the level of life that other countries with middle income enjoy today. The
strategies that De la Madrid Cordero proposes seem effective and have many elements to succeed. However, it omits a very relevant aspect, no longer for its effect on the reader, but for the success of the Mexican political system according to that aspiration: accountability. Without it, the desired modernity is not possible.
His statement is consistent with the exclusion of previous episodes in which the concentration of power and institutional opacity developed economic busts whose detriment Mexico has not surpassed. Its negative impact is evident in Graph III. 5 "Index of total productivity of the factors of production in the period 1950 to 2010"2: in 2010, there was still some way to once again reach the highest level of productivity in Mexico’s history, which was back in 1980. The set of encourag...
