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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | June 2005 
Fox Aide Calls for Fiscal Discipline
 Anthony Harrup - Dow Jones Newswire
| | Eduardo Sojo heads the presidential office of public policy. |
A top aide of President Vicente Fox urged the opposition dominated Congress to help beat a smooth economic path through next year's presidential election by accepting a balanced budget and avoiding the kind of controversy that erupted over this year's spending plan.
At a meeting with foreign reporters, Eduardo Sojo, who heads the presidential office of public policy, said the executive branch is doing its part by aiming to cover major debt amortizations for 2006 and 2007.
The country will hold presidential elections in July 2006 to pick a successor to Fox, whose six-year term ends Dec. 1 of next year. Constitutional term limits bar Fox from seeking re-election.
Congress has a responsibility, Sojo said, and called on legislators to pass a budget with a fiscal deficit of zero, but also to avoid complications and controversy like those seen this year.
In passing the 2005 budget, the lower house of Congress raised the fiscal deficit target to 0.22 percent of gross domestic product from the government's 0.14 percent proposal. Legislators also made changes in spending allotments that the executive branch said were unworkable, prompting Fox to take the case to the Supreme Court.
The court ruled last month that the president had the right to veto parts of the budget, and ordered the house to review the observations made by the executive branch.
The subject is among items to be dealt with in a special legislative session scheduled to begin June 21.
Fox plans to submit a balanced budget proposal to Congress later this year for 2006.
Although the main political parties have yet to choose their presidential candidates, they are widely expected to be Roberto Madrazo for the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), former Interior Secretary Santiago Creel for Fox's National Action Party (PAN), and Mexico City Mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador for the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).
Recent polls show López Obrador a clear favorite, followed by Madrazo and Creel.
In outlining the contents of a book he wrote titled: "From Alternation To Development," Sojo sought to show Friday that the Fox administration has been more successful economically than its predecessors. He noted lower average interest rates, lower inflation, lower budget deficits, longer average maturity of public debt and lower country risk than under previous governments.
He said extreme poverty, defined as those who don't even meet their nutrition needs, fell to 18.7 percent of the population last year from 24.2 percent in 2000.
Sojo said that after a poor start for Fox's government, employment in the formal sector recovered last year and is growing even faster this year, but he acknowledged that economic growth is well below the 7 percent Fox talked of when campaigning in 2000.
GDP grew 4.4 percent last year, but averaged 1.6 percent in the first four years of the current administration.
Sojo said the government had traced two scenarios, one with tax, energy and labor reforms, and another without.
"We're following the one without reforms. If there had been reforms, the economy could be growing above 6 percent," he said. |
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