Economics: Social policy coherence, loose ends
Social policy has long been a central theme of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and on the presidential campaign trail he largely focused on cash transfer programs and fighting corruption. Almost three months into his presidential administration his discourse has evolved somewhat, but not much has been done to flesh out a comprehensive, much less coherent, approach. Hopefully, this administration’s national development program or his proposed "Wellbeing" initiatives will fill in those sorts of indispensable guidelines and definitions, but so far the new government has only released a series of isolated public policies and logistical approaches that have tended to become the subject of intense debate.
One of the most problematic of these is the administration’s decision to apparently by-pass existing mechanisms for monitoring wellbeing and instead deploy roughly 200,000 untrained Morena party volunteers to conduct a “Wellbeing Census” lacking any rigorous methodology. Ostensibly it is to provide the government’s social policy baseline, but it appears more like a roadmap for building patronage-based partisan political machinery.
Similarly controversial was the government’s decision to cancel a longstanding transfer program to childcare centers that helped low income mothers gain access to such services. Instead the government will let those mothers receive the transfer directly and let them decide whether to spend it on household members or others, with or without training, to look after their offspring, with all the risks that could pose for the children.
The "Youth Building the Future" program is supposed to distribute university scholarships and job training apprentices, but it is unclear how the government intends to monitor their effectiveness at upskilling young people and securing them training certifications useful for obtaining future employment.
Prospera, the star social program of previous administrations, is currently in a transition phase, with various issues yet to be decided. Among the few things we know at this point is that the Ministry of Education is going to take it over. We can only hope that the program that replaces Prospera will sustain the same public policies shown to be most beneficial for the population. Unfortunately, this government has yet to show signs of being interested in seeking credible evidence or fact-based decision-making regarding such programs.
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