Social spending at the state-level in the neoliberal era: A renaissance of federalism in Mexico?

ABSTRACT

During the twentieth century, Mexican federalism was characterized by a centralization of power in the hands of the federal government. Since the 1980s, different decentralization processes gradually increased the political influence and income of states, as well as their participation in social policymaking. However, the effects of decentralization on social spending at the state level has scarcely been analyzed in Mexico. The purpose of this study is to analyze the evolution and characteristics of social spending at the state level in Mexico from 2000 to 2018. This analysis uses data from state public accounts of the 31 states and Mexico City. On average, state social expenditure per capita increased in the last two decades, but at a slower rate than overall state expenditure. Furthermore, education, the biggest share of total social expenditure, and healthcare both grew steadily, while other forms of social spending grew in more varying rates over time.

KEYWORDS:

• Social spending
• subnational social policy
• expenditure decentralization

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Acknowledgements

I thank Arturo Romero Novelo for his research assistance. I am also grateful to editors and anonymous reviewers for this journal for their helpful comments. The usual disclaimers apply.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13597566.2024.2354562)

Notes

1 The Law of Social Development, for example, determines that the federal government and states share responsibilities in different social areas, including the provision of primary education, healthcare, poverty alleviation, social protection and water provision.

2 “A vertical imbalance exists when there is a gap between own spending (total spending minus transfers paid) and own revenue (total revenues minus transfers received) at a given level of government” (Eyraud and Lusinyan 2013, 574).

3 State public accounts were not always available online, especially for those corresponding to the years before 2014. In those cases, official requests for data were made to each corresponding state government authority, at which time they sent a copy of the state public account or other documents wherein social spending data were reported, when possible. The source for Mexico City's social spending data from 2000 to 2011 is Evalúa-CDMX (n.d.).

4 Although the percentage of states that did not report disaggregated social spending was higher before 2013, the trends of education, healthcare, and other social spending from 2000 to 2018 were very similar, especially healthcare and education. It is likely that those trends could be still similar if disaggregated data had been available.

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Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.