How much progress has there been to combat poverty in Mexico? To what extent has the rise in poverty during the COVID-19 pandemic been reversed? The National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (CONEVAL) recently announced that multidimensional poverty in Mexico fell from 41.9% to 36.3% between 2018 and 2022. The decline was largely driven by a significant drop in income poverty that decreased from 49.9% to 43.5%. This encouraging news was clouded by the fact that the number of people living in extreme multidimensional poverty increased from 8.7 to 9.1 million people due to worsening access to health services, especially for the poorest population. The Georgetown Americas Institute hosted a discussion with leading experts on progress against poverty in Mexico.
This event took place in Spanish with English interpretation.
Featuring
John Scott is a professor-researcher at the Economics Division of the Center for Economic Research and Teaching (CIDE) and academic counselor of the National Council for Evaluation of Social Development Policy (CONEVAL). His areas of specialization focus on tax incidence and public spending, measurement of poverty and inequality, evaluation of health programs, social protection, labor policy, basic income, rural and agricultural development and energy subsidies, as well as issues related to human development. He has a graduate degree in philosophy from New York University and postgraduate studies in economics from Oxford University.
Gerardo Esquivel (discussant) received his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard in 1997. He also holds a B.A. in economics from the National University Autonomous of Mexico (UNAM, 1989) and an M.A. in economics from El Colegio de Mexico (1991). He has been a professor of economics at El Colegio de Mexico since 1998. Previously, he worked as a senior macroeconomics researcher at the Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID). Mr. Esquivel has also been a consultant for the International Monetary Fund, the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Bank, the United Nations Development Program and the Central Bank in Mexico. He has also been a consultant for the Ministry of Social Development and the Ministry of Economy in Mexico and he was Economic Advisor for Mexico City's Secretary of Finance between 2004 and 2005.
Luis Felipe Lopez-Calva (discussant) is the global director for the World Bank Group’s Poverty and Equity Global Practice (GP) in the Equitable Growth, Finance, and Institutions (EFI) Vice Presidency. Lopez-Calva has over 30 years of professional experience working with international institutions and advising national governments. He rejoined the World Bank in 2022 from the United Nations Development Programme, where he served as UN assistant secretary general and regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean since 2018.
Alejandro Werner is the founding director of the Georgetown Americas Institute and a non-resident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute. He recently completed almost nine years as director of the Western Hemisphere Department at the International Monetary Fund. Prior to that appointment, he was undersecretary of finance and public credit in Mexico’s Finance Ministry and held several positions in that ministry and the Central Bank. He also taught at leading universities in Mexico, Spain, and the United States. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.A. in economics from Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM).
Nora Lustig (chair) is a resident fellow with the Georgetown Americas Institute and Samuel Z. Stone Professor of Latin American Economics and the founding director of the Commitment to Equity Institute (CEQ) at Tulane University. She is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, the Center for Global Development and the Inter-American Dialogue. Lustig’s research is on economic development, inequality and social policies with emphasis on Latin America. She is the editor of Commitment to Equity Handbook: Estimating the Impact of Fiscal Policy on Inequality and Poverty (2018), a step-by-step guide to assessing the impact of taxation and social spending on inequality and poverty in developing countries. Lustig is a founding member and president emeritus of the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association (LACEA) and was a co-director of the World Bank’s World Development Report 2000, Attacking Poverty. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Economic Inequality and is a member of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality’s Executive Council. Lustig served on the Atkinson Commission on Poverty, the High-Level Group on Measuring Economic Performance and Social Progress, and the G20 Eminent Persons Group on Global Financial Governance. She received her doctorate in economics from the University of California, Berkeley.