For our second installment we met up with Dr. Juan Carlos Moreno-Brid, Associate Director of the Mexican office of the United Nations’ CEPAL (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean–or ECLAC–in English), to discuss inequality and development policy in Mexico and the wider region.
Moreno-Brid has also just recently published a book, with colleague Jaime Ross, through Oxford University Press entitled “Development and Growth in the Mexican Economy: a historical perspective.” It’s now available in both English and Spanish.
In our interview, Moreno-Brid pins Mexico’s inequality ills largely on a lack of fiscal reform, which has been systematically blocked by elites. These established elites, who have an interest in resisting taxation, Moreno-Brid argues, assert that government spending is inefficient and ineffective. It’s a dynamic of control and distrust, he suggests, that can be traced back to Spanish colonization, and the 18th century Bourbon Reforms. Those reforms, while successful at increasing tax revenues, were aimed specifically at improving Spanish –not colonial– economic welfare and political life.
We’ve posted the edited transcript below.
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The Global Roots of Inequality 