Paul Gillingham: prediction

Transcript context

…The village itself can make it hard to migrate because you cannot, in isolated fashion, sell your land to an outsider. Someone’s willing to bid for it, but the whole village, in essence, has a veto on whether you can sell your land. Wages are much higher outside the village. Alcoholism is lower outside the villages, typically. Should the villages be subsidized or, in essence, should moving to the cities be subsidized in terms of a net effective policy? I think that villages should be subsidized, and Mexican policymakers have realized that for a long time and done so. I think that land is no longer the question. Most people in villages—this depends very much where you go—but the reason half the men aren’t there is precisely because they have migrated to work, whether it be migrating to cities, whether it be migrating to the north. Remittances are a key source—they are the lifeline for many villages. That’s the way it’s been for nearly a century. You get a certain amount of small-scale cultivation, as always, of maize, tomato, squash, chilies, et cetera, your full nutrient package. That’s a small portion of what people are actually doing in villages. That’s increasingly uneconomic on a market, local level. This is why you get this out-migration that you talk about. It’s not just male. It’s also women. Ever since they set up maquiladoras, there’s been a huge outflow. The more entrepreneurial to these factories on the border, tax-free zones to assemble US components. Alcoholism, what remains, the real economic stress with this huge out-migration of young people, expresses itself, as it does in a lot of people, with drinking. What’s interesting, though, is not with drugs. Alcohol is this very strong constant. Speaking as a Brit, to speak about other people’s alcohol consumption is slightly hypocritical, and I’m not going to really go there. It is interesting that historically, Mexico is a hard-drinking society, and we’re going back to the colony now. Say I look at India, a country with a lot of problems. India typically grows between 4 percent to 8 percent a year, depending which numbers you believe. Mexico is lucky to grow at 2 percent a year. What accounts for the difference? Where is Mexico failing?…

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