Economics: Fuzzy economics of the final debate
The third and final presidential candidates’ debate was planned around three broad policy areas, the first being economic growth, poverty and inequality. But, unfortunately, the contenders preferred to spend most of their time attacking one another, and when they did get around to economic policy promises they failed to specify what measures they would employ to make their proposals viable without jeopardizing public finance and inflating the debt.
Admittedly, a four-way candidates' debate provides relatively little time to detail proposals, but we had hoped the candidates could get around to offering more than promises to strengthen the internal market, raise wages, lower tax rates, expand public and private investment, increase social spending, and root out corruption. Who could possibly object to such goals? But there were no explanations of how might they be credibly achieved without a major expansion of deficit spending and inflating public sector debt.
In contrast to the candidates’ failure to provide clear proposals in these regards, we at GEA believe that the next federal government must abide by the Economic Policy Criteria devised by the current administration, which have already set minimum targets for Mexico to achieve over the course of 2019. These include the projected macroeconomic variables the finance ministry set out in the pre-criteria text for 2019 it released in March this year, such as deficit and debt targets devised to assure macro-financial stability over the medium term.
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