Mexico has an unequal society. Distinctions between its northern and southern states are pronounced. While at an overall level, Mexico is making progress towards achieving some of the other Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), poverty and poor nutrition still affect many residents of its southern states. In the year 2000, some 52 million people – half of the country’s population – were living below the official poverty line. The proportion of people living on less than one dollar a day has not improved for more than a decade now.

Independent research examines the developmental progress of the country by sub-group and region. It highlights the need for policies to bring about economic progress and promote a more equal society in Mexico. There are wide variations in wealth, health and educational achievement. Northern Mexico is primarily urban and industrialised while the southern region has a less developed economy, mainly based on subsistence agriculture.

At a national level, the country made significant steady progress in the 1990s:

• The percentage of students completing primary education rose by more than 15 per cent.
• Illiteracy rates among those who were15 years and older dropped to less than 10 per cent.
• Child mortality rates for those under five years old dropped by almost half –from 45 to 25 deaths for every 1000 live births.
• Gender gaps in enrolment in all levels of education were largely overcome.
• A little over two-thirds of the population had access to good sanitation, which was an improvement on the earlier 60 per cent coverage.

Despite these overall improvements, disparities persist. These are not limited just to regions but are also shaped by a skewed demographic distribution. The south is home to most of the indigenous groups who comprise about 8-12 per cent of the Mexican population who are amongst the poorest. Also, there is both a high concentration of people in a few large cities and a great dispersal of people in thousands of small, hard-to-access localities. This influences the impact and reach of poverty alleviation programs and policies.

Gaps in educational attainment further entrench Mexican inequality and ethnic marginalisation. In the poor southern states of Chiapas, Oaxaca and Yucatan, primarily inhabited by the indigenous communities, one in five adults is uneducated. While on an average, a child in Mexico City receives close to 10 years of schooling; children in rural areas like Oaxaca attend school for only 5 years.

Most policy processes have not addressed these deep-rooted inequalities. On the contrary:

• Political manipulation and indiscriminate allocation of public resources which were the rule in until 1990s were meant to achieve political goals and did not target the poorest or most unequal states.
• Centralised governance continues to shape the country’s development path and the bulk of social spending is still allocated by the federal government.
• There have been some tentative moves towards decentralisation recently but it may be too early to say whether this will help in alleviating poverty and it also poses a new problem - that of accountability at the state and local government levels.
• Until recently, homogeneous one-size-fits-all programmes were pushed down without any recognition or responsiveness to local needs.

Although at the general level Mexico is on track to achieve most of the MDGs, at the regional and different subgroup levels the record has been mixed. Amidst clear evidence that Mexico is headed in the right direction, income inequality seems to be rising. More attention and federal and state resources must be directed to pockets of poverty and poor nutrition. It cannot be a coincidence that those Mexican states with the greatest percentage of indigenous groups are also those recording the highest poverty and illiteracy levels, the worst gender equity and the lowest provision of basic sewage, water, electricity, transport and garbage collection services.

Source(s):
‘Mexico and the Millennium Development Goals at the subnational level’, Journal of Human Development, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp95-119, by Ricardo Fuentes and Andres Montes, March 2004

id21 Research Highlight: 30 September 2004

Further Information:
Ricardo Fuentes
Human Development Report Office
United Nations Development Programme
304 E. 45th Street, 12th Floor,
New York, 10017
USA

Tel: + 1 (212) 906-3662
Fax: + 1 (212) 906-3678
Contact the contributor: ricardo.fuentes@undp.org

Human Development Report, UNDP

Andres Montes
London School of Economics
Government Department
Houghton Street
London WC2A 2AE
UK

Tel: +44 (0)207 6070436
Contact the contributor: P.A.Montes@lse.ac.uk

Government Department, London School of Economics, UK

Other related links:
'Measuring the results: how to monitor progress towards the Millennium Development Goals'

'Missing the targets: poor progress on the MDGs '

'Aid, public expenditure and Millennium Development Goals: is collaboration possible?'

'Meeting the Millenium Poverty Reduction Targets in Latin America and the Carribean'