Rich in minerals, oil, abundant fertile land and hardworking people, I don’t think so! Mexico is a ROBBED country. I believe that the rulers in Afgahnistan will use it as their prototype, and establish a similar cleptocracy. 
I’m not sure what the debate is.
Mexico is more of a middle income country. they have a GDP of 1 trillion and per capita GDP of about 10k per person. I’m not sure why most latin american countries are so unequal, but its not a poor nation like Kenya or Zambia.
Plus according to Goldman Sachs by 2050 they will have an economy the size of France & the UK combined.
Anyway, point is Mexico is not Afghanistan. Mexico is a middle income country with infrastructure that is set to overtake developed economies in the next few decades in GDP. Afghanistan is something totally different.
Do you have a source for that? A quick check on the CIA factbook says that Mexico has 113 million people and a GDP per person of around $14,000, while France & the UK have 123 million between them and a GDP per person of around $34,000.
I can believe that in 40 years Mexico’s GDP could be what the UK & France’s are now (that would require about 2.5% annual real growth), but I have trouble believing that Mexico’s 2050 GDP is predicted to be bigger than the UK and France’s 2050 GDP (which will probably have grown quite a bit).
Trust me, Mexico is not a poor country. I have seen poor countries.
(Not only did the Americans steal half the country, but they stole the half with the good roads!)
I was really surprised to see that the GDP of Mexico is right around Australia’s and India’s depending on which source you go by. What the Hell?
So why do we have thousands of Mexicans streaming across the border on a weekly basis? I know corruption is rampant in Mexico but it sure seems that there should be enough opportunity to make a living in that country.
Heh. Well, it was more like a third, and even that is a pretty shallow assesment. Mexico “owned” the land by virtue of Spain having claimed it, although they didn’t really excercise much control or have much of anything resembling a government in what is now Texas, Arizona, or even most of California.
I’d guess because GDP per Capita in Mexico, per Google Public Data site is ~US$10k and GDP per Capita in Aussie land is ~US$47k, or almost most five times richer. India’s only at US$1k per capita so that’s really significantly poorer. Of course there’s an ocean between you and India. If you look at a map you may notice, the large blue thing labelled “Pacific Ocean.” Oceans have been known to inhibit mass migration…
This!
You couldn’t PAY most of American’s even poorest people to leave America and live somewhere else. Same probably goes for many other western middle of the road GDP per capita countries. Yet MILLIONS of Mexicans risk take epic journeys dealing with criminals, often spending their entire lifes wealth to do so and risk life and limb to move to another country where they don’t speak the language, will be on the bottom of the socio-economic ladder, could be deported, and leave behind friends and family to boot.
Apparently for millions of Mexicans, Mexico really sucks donkey balls. Maybe its time for a better revolution?
Your GDP is something like 5 to 10 times that of your southern neighbours, that rather renders a comparison between your poor and their poor… bizarre.
But you may recall in the living memory of your old citizens some tens of thousands of poor Europeans crossing that large blue expanse called the Atlantic for fairly similar reasons…
Mexico needs time to develop, so they export some people to you… eh.
A lot of Mexico’s image problem is distribution of wealth. Look at the USA. We have pockets of poverty in our rural states and in the inner cities.
For example in Chicago, you have a ghetto project and the rich Gold Coast area. But these are seperated by blocks so you can easily say “Well it’s no big deal.”
If you’re gonna have to travel miles and miles the contrast is more striking.
I recall years and years ago, I worked in a hotel in Benton Harbor, Michigan. The difference between Benton Harbor and Saint Joseph Michigan (across the river) was striking. It really made a point. But if the two cities had their rich and poor mixed in, it would’ve been much less noticable.
I disagree with this. I could find you thousands if not tens of thousands of poor Americans who would gladly pull up and move to some Europeans countries or New Zealand or Australia IF they could. They wouldn’t want to move to a poorer nation, but given the opportunity to go to another Western - First world nation, you’d find a ton of immigrants from this country. Especially in the poorer areas. They’d go in a flash
I was surprised about the per capita GDP. You could actually live fairly comfortably in Mexico on 10K a year, but very few people actually make that, which is so many come over here. I guess the Carlos Slims and other plutocrats skew the numbers pretty wildly.
It’s not just that. Large sections of Mexico are… poor. Very poor. It’s different around Mexico City- more people with more money.
Time my ass.
They have had as much time as we have, maybe even more. And plenty of resources.
Or perhaps the English that invaded north America knew what the frack they were doing while the Spanish who invaded Mexico didnt have a clue…
The place has been mismanaged horribly. Most of the blame goes to the managers obviously. But some of it goes to the lower people putting up with that shit. Hence my revolution comment.
Tens of thousands is slightly lower number than millions. And whats stopping em?
I was even more surprised to learn they have a space agency.
Si. Fly.
So do China, Russia, India, and (I believe) Israel. And even Brazil, if memory serves.
Unmanned spaceflight in particular has become inexpensive enough that a medium-income country can take a reasonable stab at it, if it’s working with others.
Maybe this will help.
http://www.sustainablemiddleclass.com/Gini-Coefficient.html
It was a Goldman Sachs study. They claim in 2050 Mexico will have a GDP of 9.3 trillion (vs 5.1 for the UK & 4.6 for France) and Mexico will have a 63k per capita income vs. 75k and 80k in the UK & France.
The same Goldman Sachs whose poor planning, lack of insight and inability to predict the future helped collapse the global economy? The very same.
As a relative percentage of the overall population, no. But there is a very large, and growing, middle class. It’s not all oligarchs and peons; the cities are full of accountants, attorneys, librarians, small business owners, insurance agents, mid-level functionaries and other assorted professionals whose kids will go to college and whose class will continue to grow.
On the other hand, rural Mexico, the source of a large chunk of northward illegal immigration, is characterized by mostly uneducated, culturally ignorant families whose children will continue on the same path. The rule of law is not a primary concern for people whose futures are bleak, and so trying their luck in the U.S. is an attractive option. Imagine if the Negro Exodus was blocked by a holey wall; it would not have been surprising to see people trying to get through those holes.
While there is an enormous wage disparity between managers and workers and owners, and though only a few workers will make it to management, it’s not impossible or even unusual for a worker to enter management ranks.
The biggest impediment to a fairer distribution of wealth are extreme cronyism/patronage, much more than “traditional” corruption in the form of petty rent-seeking.