Mexico City is now dominated by a huge double-deck highway system that Lopez Obrador built when he was mayor. It is a system that benefits the rich primarily who own cars and have reason to want to get quickly from the far end of the city to the airport. But in a huge metropolitan area that lacks basic public services like clean water in many neighborhoods, it seems like an absurd waste of public resources. This is from someone who claims to speak for Mexico’s poor: what Lopez Obrador figured out is how to impress the poor with monumental public works projects, while doing little to help them in the long run.
On the other hand, the last two free-market liberal presidents Zedillo and Fox have presided over one of the most impressive experiments in social policy in Latin America aimed at helping the poor. The Progresa program of conditional cash transfers provided a cash stipend to poor families on the condition that they send their children to school. The program was designed by an economist, who built into it a way of empirically testing its effects by creating control groups that could be used to benchmark its impact. There are a host of econometric studies now documenting how Progresa raised school attendance rates dramatically (though its final impact on long-term educational outcomes is still uncertain). Early success led to the program being extended broadly across Mexico under Fox as the Oportunidades program, where it now reaches into urban neighborhoods. Someone at the conference told me that there is evidence that as much as ten percent of the vote for the Calderon’s conservative party the PAN in last July’s election was due to the popularity of Oportunidades.
Progresa’s success has led to it being copied in other parts of Latin America, like the Red de Proteccion Social program in Nicaragua, the Programa de Asignaciones Familiares in Honduras and the Bolsa Familia in Brazil. The Bolsa Familia was started under pro-market president Fernando Henrique Cardoso and was expanded by his leftist successor Lula. It now reaches some 15 million poor Brazilians, and appears to have had an actual impact in lowering that country’s Gini coefficient (a measure of income inequality, Brazil’s being one of the highest in the world).
