OR
modern left na should reduce inequalities without giving up growth. In Mexico and Latin America, Social Justice has tried via current spending and transfers, without building the productive base that supports it. The result is immediate relief, but without structural change that raises productivity, generates qualified employment and expand value chains. It is redistributed, but without creating the wealth that is distributed.
It is presented as “Keynesian”, but serious Keynesianism is anti -cyclical: it spends in recession, saves on bonanza and directs the impulse to sectors capable of responding with more domestic offer. When an economy lacks productive capacity and its financial system does not channel industrial credit, the stimulus is filtered into imports, the deficit widens and erodes income. It is not a doctrinal debate, but experience of open economies without a productive apparatus.
The bottleneck is financial and productive. The Bank of Mexico is autonomous of the Executive, but submissive to a bank that concentrates 76 percent of the assets in five foreign institutions. Set the interest rate, but does not control the fate of savings. Thus we have apparent exchange stability, but not productive investment. Financial sovereignty remains absent.
It is true that social programs have reduced poverty. That achievement is real, but without a productive engine those conquests are fragile: they depend on the political cycle and the tax juncture. Internal consumption grows, yes, but not by industrial wages or productivity, but for welfare. You spend more, but the same is produced. The domestic market inflates out: sales of imported increase, not national chains.
Hence the fallacy of “expanding the domestic market” through transfers without industry. The market is not strengthened when the consumption of external goods grows, but when factories, local suppliers and jobs that sustain demand increase. Example: trains acquired for national projects were largely manufactured abroad, with little national content. A strategic investment resulted in learning and employment outside the country, not in Mexico.
The region offers lessons. Argentina chained expense and debt until chronic inflation; Venezuela wasted its income without diversification; Mexico combined social programs with industrial stagnation. Nothing invalidates redistribution, but shows its condition: without productive capabilities, equity depends on booms Transitory or favorable exchange rates.
Asian contrast teaches method. Japan, Korea, Taiwan and then China articulated public and commercial banking, credit goals, macroeconomic discipline and selective industrial policy. Foreign direct investment was useful as a complement to access technology and markets, but no successful country based its development on FDI. The national company, the productive credit and state planning were always the axis. In Korea, the productive credit exceeded 40 percent of the total during industrialization, compared to the low percentage in Mexico, where consumer credit predominates. The slogan was clear: first produce and save; Then consume.
What to do in Mexico? Change growth regime. A viable route has five axes. First, pragmatic financial sovereignty that disciplines the banking system, with productive credit goals and development banks that grant guarantees and coinversion to industrial SMEs. Second, selective industrial policy in sectors with chains – anurery, machinery, auto parts, power electronics, fine chemistry, advanced agribusiness – where the State uses public purchases and national content to detonate suppliers. Mexico must begin to manufacture its own consumer electronics, as an initial step towards the design of integrated circuits, and recover the production of drugs and agrochemicals that we import today. Third, guide science and innovation to national missions-health, energy, electric mobility, food sovereignty-, with effective technological transfer and university-company linking. Fourth, promote technical human capital with dual training and technological education that raise labor productivity. Fifth, a salary pact that makes the anchor of the domestic market worthy, so that productivity does not translate into inequality but in popular consumption that strengthens the national industry.
It is not about choosing between equity and growth: the key is to sustain equity with productivity, link social justice with industrial modernization and build a virtuous circle.
It is also necessary to update the macro toolbox. Maintaining fiscal balance is not austerity: it means prioritizing strategic public investment, coordinating it with development credit and using exchange rate and energy rates to strengthen national chains. Stability should not be an end in itself, but productive transformation platform.
Politics must recover direction. The dispersion of multiply costs and dilutes impacts. A productive policy coordinating center – you must set goals, measure and give up – it is worth more than 100 unconnected initiatives. Execution capacity is the new development border.
The decision is clear. Or we continue to manage deficiencies with current spending that is exhausted soon, or we build the productive base that makes rights sustainable. A country that saves, invests and learns, which chains suppliers and raises wages, can redistribute without fragility. Social justice depends on industrial ambition. And to achieve this, it is urgent to Mexicanize the bank – not nationalize it, but to ensure that it is owned by Mexicans and function in favor of national priorities. Only in this way will the savings stop feeding the speculation or utilities sent abroad and will become productive credit for industry and employment. Mexico can and should redistribute because it produces, and produce because it invests in its people and its industry. That is the horizon of a national modernization.
*CIDE director
