Blog on Mexican Economy and Politics
November 24, 2009
American University economics professor Robert Blecker points me in the direction of "El placer de disentir", an excellent blog by economist Gerardo Esquivel on the Mexican economy and politics.
A post today notes that an international rating agency has downgraded Mexican sovereign debt, citing a host of economic problems facing the country. Esquivel comments that seven of the eight reasons cited (including high dependence on oil, weak public finances, and slower economic growth than the rest of the region) are ongoing structural problems that should have been built into the agency's rating all along. (I was struck by how many of the negative factors essentially represent a critique --from the left-- of Mexican macroeconomic policy: lack of a credible countercyclical economic plan and the likely inability to raise tax revenues in the future, for example.)
A post from last week compiles several recent foreign news stories on Mexico, including a depressing piece by Philip Caputo in the current issue of The Atlantic on "The Fall of Mexico" and a story on "reverse remittances" --the poor in Mexico sending money to their struggling relatives in the United States-- that appeared in the New York Times in mid-November.