September 03, 2015
The NYT had a piece on how Mexico’s economy remains weak and the government is again plagued by corruption. At one point it comments that:
“Growth has been slower under Mr. Peña Nieto’s presidency than the annual 2.3 percent average in the two decades before he took office.”
It is worth noting that a 2.3 percent growth rate is extremely weak for a developing country. It means that Mexico was actually falling further behind the United States even before the slowdown under President Nieto. Furthermore, as the article points out, it appears that workers are seeing little or no benefit from even this limited growth, as wages remain quite low.
Last year marked the twentieth anniversary of the implementation of NAFTA. At the time there was much celebration in the media and among economists anxious to pronounce the deal a huge success. While it is always possible that Mexico’s economy would have performed even worse without NAFTA, its actual record is not much to boast about.
It is worth singling out the Washington Post in this context which periodically celebrates the rise of the middle class in Mexico in the post-NAFTA era. The Post famously invented numbers to make its pro-NAFTA case, telling readers back in 2007 that Mexico’s GDP had quadrupled since 1987. The actual increase was 83 percent. It has never bothered to correct this one.
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