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One response to “Mexico”

1. international

   December 25, 2017

   Posner

   As for energy (which means oil), it will be opened to competition, but the huge government oil company, Pemex, will continue to be government-owned. Will it have the power to block effective competition from private companies? Who knows. And there is concern that oil production doesn’t do a great deal for an economy because it doesn’t provide widespread employment.

   As for telecommunications, I would expect more competition to produce a more efficient telecommunications system, but I don’t have a clear idea of what contribution an improvement in telecommunications makes to economic output. That presumably depends on how great the improvement is.

   I don’t see anything in the Mexican administration’s reform program concerning drug violence. There is an extraordinary level of drug violence in Mexico resulting from what amounts to warfare among the numerous drug cartels, and it is abetted by widespread public corruption. The drug wars, which appear to kill about 10,000 Mexicans a year, must be a drag on economic output. The annual number of murders in Mexico is almost twice the number of U.S. murders, even though the U.S. population is more than two and a half times the Mexican population.

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