Mexico's high-stakes presidential vote: 4 questions answered

The next Mexican president will inherit a country torn by drug violence. Tackling deep-seated democratic and economic challenges is key to progress.

Can more oil be found?

Energy and fiscal reform top the wish list when it comes to structural reforms. With proven reserves declining, Mexico’s state-owned oil company, Pemex, could become a net importer within the next decade if it doesn’t find more sources of oil. But privatization is anathema, and even opening it up to foreign production is strictly prohibited under Mexico’s Constitution. Mexico lacks the technology to explore in areas such as the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico. At the same time, Mexico relies on tax revenue from oil to fund more than a third of its budget, meaning Pemex has no surplus to reinvest in technology or education. Yet Mexico’s overall tax rate is so low that the nation has had no choice but to rely on its oil company to make up the difference. Mexico’s tax to gross domestic product ratio of 20 percent, according to the OECD, is low by international standards, and Mexico’s complicated tax system is rife with evasion.

“[Spending] is inefficient and deficient,” says Francisco Davila Suarez, the secretary-general of the Colosio Foundation. The foundation is aligned with the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which ruled Mexico for most of the 20th century.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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