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n this 2026, the beginning of the second quarter of the 21st century, the global world is heading towards an open and merciless (dis)order. Not only economic or financial, in the style of 2008-2009, but with epicenters in what we have called geopolitics. A systemic disruption that affects and will affect all areas of life: from the economy and its exchanges (commercial, financial, industrial) to the collective action organizations of the United Nations and governance systems. Nothing seems to remain standing from the euphoric globalizing discourse of the last decades of the 20th century.
“The 2020s are on track to be the decade of the weakest global growth since the 1960s, which is widening gaps in income and living standards between already rich countries, the so-called ‘developing’ and low-income countries,” the World Bank noted a couple of days ago and added: “This global outlook shows an insufficient growth rate to reduce extreme poverty and create jobs where they are most needed.” (“This decade will be the one with the lowest global growth since 1960: WB”, The Day1/14/26, Dora Villanueva).
Bad economics and politics; authoritarian and hate speech; broken rules. These and other news do not bring anything good, even if it were on the margins, but the worst scenarios are drawn in countries that, like ours, have economies without growth, generate few formal jobs that are completely insufficient, with reduced investments and very limited fiscal spaces. Essential needs do not match these economic panoramas and grow without pause, which contributes to maintaining and reproducing our inequalities and deepening social and territorial gaps.
Given these conditions, insistence on the issue cannot be seen as routine: Mexico needs to find a path that allows its economy to grow and redistribute, weaving links between macroeconomic policies and a sustainable productive development agenda that allows consistently closing the gaps that mark face, geography, and dispositions.
Recently, the famous British economist and financier Michael Roberts (was) asking “What to do about inequality?” (What to do with extreme inequality? without permission12/13/25) and pointed out that according to the most recent global inequality report (World Inequality Lab), which brings together leading researchers, among others the Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz and Thomas Piketty, it emphasizes that inequalities can be reduced through public investment in education and health, using effective taxation and redistribution programs. Secular proposal but always postponed.
The report proposes measures such as public investment in education and health and redistributive programs among which, Roberts highlights, are “(…) cash transfers, pensions, unemployment benefits and specific support for vulnerable households can directly shift resources from the top to the bottom of the distribution.”
We are talking about relevant measures and, in the best of cases, implemented in drops. Seen together, these and other “packages” for public action recognize and underline the importance of fiscal policy (the substantive increase in public revenues and a rational programming of spending). This is and has been for decades one of the main tools to confront inequalities and the chronic lack of economic growth.
Hence our insistence: Mexico needs to strive to achieve social reform of the State; a serious effort that contemplates recovering the basic functions of the State as an articulator and coordinator of society and its contradictions. This State, to be one, would now have to be social, of law, rights and constitutional.
For the State to be able to respect and fulfill in practice the universality of social rights, it must have the capacity to collect, spend and manage public resources with transparency and rigor. To confront poverty and inequality, it has been said that it is not enough to provide direct monetary support; Economic policies are necessary that contribute to the economy growing by redistributing, through salaries, without a doubt, but above all through employment.
The Mexican State must update its functions, in our case “truncated” by its permanently reduced tax capacity and its reluctance and political inability to move towards a state reform inscribed – formally and politically – in objectives calibrated to achieve economic growth with equity.
In the midst of the uncertainties and strife with which 2026 dawned, now overwhelmed by the social and political confusion in the environment, we can aspire to forge a national strategy for social, economic and productive transformation, like a compass that guides us in the midst of storms.
A strategy that turns us into the social Mexico that summarizes our history.
