Los Pinos, April 25, 2006. Paul Wolfowitz: Very well. Thank you. I have been in Mexico now in this official visit for about eight hours. It has been really an excellent meeting with President Fox and I appreciate the chance to get his perspectives. Obviously, this is an interesting time in being in the middle of a presidential election, but I think it speaks well for Mexican democracy that you can have this kind of open debate in a peaceful and generous fashion. I think Mexico has a lot to be proud of in terms of what it has accomplished in overall economic policy and in a number of important innovations and in reducing poverty in this country. That is one of the programs I am looking forward of seeing firsthand in Guerrero State, the “Oportunidades” program is something I believe was the inspiration for similar programs that I visited in Brazil, called the “Bolsa familia” program which in turn has inspired innovations in other countries as far away as Indonesia. And that is one of the things that actually captures two aspects of the work of the World Bank. First of all, our emphasis on the importance of poverty reduction, but also our interest in being able to work with countries like Mexico that are in the forefront of the developing world and innovations that can be of value to other developing countries. We also saw some impressive innovations earlier in the day in the area of building institutions of transparency and accountability. I was particularly impressed in the presentation we had at IFAI –if I have the pronunciation correctly- to enable citizens to have access to information from government officials. It was quite an impressive program and also the procurement reform that I saw at the Ministry of Administration. These are issues of transparency and accountability in combating corruption. The countries struggle with around the world, particularly, it is important in the developing world because it is a real obstacle to economic growth and I was impressed in the advances that seemed to be made here in Mexico and I know very much that what I saw was a sign of a momentum that is really unstoppable. And then, as the Ministry said –actually he did not mention we had a very good lunch at the Foreign Ministry- with a group of people from various think tanks and academia, and then we had a short, but excellent presentation, on what Mexican authorities hope to do with this World Bank support for a study on how to improve competitiveness in Mexico which is clearly going to be one of the challenges on the next age. I learned a lot already in a short time and I look forward to learning much more in the next two days. |
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