SINCE taking office as Mexico’s president 18 months ago, Enrique Peña Nieto has implemented an extraordinarily ambitious set of reforms. He has swept away a constitutional taboo on private investment in energy, gained new tools to bust private oligopolies, and wrested power from the teachers’ union, whose leader is in jail. This month a limited political reform was approved as well.Yet this impressive list has one striking omission. In the opening pages of a book in which he set out his campaign platform (translated into English as “Mexico: The Great Hope”), even before detailing any of the measures that he has since accomplished, Mr Peña promised first and foremost “a new Universal Social Security System”, to be financed largely from general tax revenues, rather than the current system which relies on payroll contributions. This new proposal would reduce incentives to enter or remain in the “informal” economy, he wrote. As a result, “job quality, productivity and economic growth all go up.”Quite so. Yet this reform has not just all but vanished from the government’s agenda, but Luis Videgaray, the finance minister and reform tsar, appears to have shut the door on...
from The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1nGzRCq
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