Mexico

Being able to swim empowers individuals to make choices, have agency, and be free to choose core aspects of their life, such as working safely on or near water. It is also associated with lifelong health benefits and reduces the risk of drowning. Using data from the Lloyd’s Register Foundation World Risk Poll 2019, this paper provides the first global estimates of adults’ ability to swim without assistance. Individuals in high-income countries are considerably more likely to report being able to swim without assistance than individuals in low-income countries. Disparities also exist within countries. In particular, women are less likely to be able to swim without assistance than men in virtually all countries, birth cohorts, and levels of education. Investing in reducing inequalities in life skills, such as swimming, can foster economic development and empowerment, especially in light of threats, such as climate change.

Many Latin American countries have experienced improvements in income over recent decades, with several of them now classified as high-income or upper middle-income in terms of conventional metrics. But has this change been mirrored in improvements across the different areas of people’s lives? How’s Life in Latin America? Measuring Well-being for Policy Making addresses this question by presenting comparative evidence for Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) with a focus on 11 LAC countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay). Spanning material conditions, quality of life, resources for future well-being, and inequalities, the report presents available evidence on well-being both before and since the onset of the pandemic, based on the OECD Well-being Framework. It also identifies priorities for addressing well-being gaps and describes how well-being frameworks are used in policy within Latin America and elsewhere around the world, providing lessons for governments on what is needed to put people’s well-being at the centre of their action. The report is part of the EU Regional Facility for Development in Transition for Latin America and the Caribbean.

Skills are the key to shaping a better future, and central to the capacity of countries and people to thrive in an increasingly interconnected and rapidly changing world. Megatrends such as globalisation, technological advances and demographic change, compounded by the effects of the COVID‑19 pandemic, are reshaping work and society, as well as the types of skills most in demand in the labour market. OECD Skills Strategy projects provide a strategic and comprehensive approach to assess countries’ skills challenges and opportunities and help them build more effective skills systems. The OECD works collaboratively with countries to develop policy responses tailored to each country’s specific skills needs. The foundation of this approach is the OECD Skills Strategy Framework, which allows for an exploration of what countries can do better to: 1) develop relevant skills over the life course; 2) use skills effectively in work and in society; and 3) strengthen the governance of the skills system. This report, OECD Skills Strategy Tlaxcala (Mexico): Assessment and Recommendations, identifies opportunities and makes recommendations to strengthen the skills of youth, foster greater participation in adult learning, use people’s skills more effectively to raise productivity, and strengthen the governance of the skills system in the state of Tlaxcala, Mexico.

Informal employment, defined through the lack of employment-based social protection, constitutes the bulk of employment in developing countries, and entails a level of vulnerability to poverty and other risks that are borne by all who are dependent on informal work income. Results from the Key Indicators of Informality based on Individuals and their Households database (KIIbIH) show that a disproportionately large number of middle‑class informal economy workers receive remittances. Such results confirm that risk management strategies, such as migration, play a part in minimising the potential risks of informal work for middle‑class informal households who may not be eligible to social assistance. They further suggest that middle‑class informal workers may have a solvent demand for social insurance so that, if informality-robust social insurance schemes were made available to them, remittances could potentially be channelled to finance the extension of social insurance to the informal economy.

Behavioural insights (BI) has become widely used by public bodies around the world, mostly towards improving the way policies are implemented and influencing individual behaviour. As the field of BI evolves to tackle more complex policy issues, there is widespread perception that BI can and should go beyond the study of individual-level decision processes for higher impact. This report presents research on applying BI to changing the behaviour of organisations, with a focus on fostering elements of a safety culture in the energy sector. It presents comparative findings from experiments with energy regulators in Canada, Ireland, Mexico and Oman, as well as guidance for applying BI to safety culture going forward.

This review highlights achievements of the Mexican Institute of Social Security (Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social, IMSS) in a number of areas – human resources, technological capacities and relations with suppliers – which were previously identified by the OECD as pivotal for the successful reform of IMSS procurement operations. This report highlights the progress made and offers recommendations to support IMSS in achieving procurement excellence and fulfilling its mandate to provide the best possible, most cost-effective healthcare services to citizens.

Under President Enrique Peña Nieto’s leadership, Mexico has put together the most ambitious reform package of any OECD country in recent times, forged the political consensus necessary to approve it through the unprecedented Pacto por México, promoted these and other reforms in Congress and has started implementing them. The battery of reforms has addressed challenges in policy areas that had been waiting for deep changes for decades, including education, labour, tax, health, telecommunication, and energy and justice, among many others. Mexico still faces important challenges which is why it is crucial for Mexico to continue its reform agenda. It is imperative to strengthen some of the recent reforms, and to keep updating and promoting them to ensure their effective implementation. The OECD stands ready to further accompany Mexico on this path.

Mexico is slowly advancing on the path to gender equality. Many public policies aimed at empowering women are now in place: over the past two decades, Mexico has increased investments in girls' education, greatly expanded childcare and preschool, improved gender mainstreaming in government, and ensured that female politicians are well-represented at the ballot box. Yet, despite these efforts, many Mexican women still do not feel the effects of these policies at home, at work, or in public spaces. Large gender gaps remain in educational outcomes, participation in the labour market, pay, informality status, and hours of unpaid childcare and housework. 'Unlocking Mexico’s full potential,' as Mexico's National Development Plan prescribes, will depend crucially on how well Mexico closes existing gender gaps in political, social and economic life and promotes real social change. Mexico must continue to invest in social and labour market policies that empower women, and reinvigorate efforts to reduce inequalities in education, labour force participation, job quality, unpaid work, and leadership. This will require embedding gender equality objectives in all public policies and budgets, across all levels of government, and ensuring the effective implementation, enforcement, and evaluation of policies and laws to achieve inclusive outcomes.

The equal inclusion of women in economic life is a key driver of economic growth throughout the world, including the Pacific Alliance countries of Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru. Talent is lost, and future growth suffers, when women do not have the same opportunities as men to reach their full potential in the labour market. All countries of the world have work to do to advance the equality agenda, and Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru have much to do. While girls and women in the Pacific Alliance are progressing on the path to gender equality and inclusive growth, significant roadblocks remain.

This review assesses the Mexican pension system according to the OECD best practices and guidelines, and draws on international experiences and examples to make recommendations on how to improve it. It provides an international perspective on Mexico’s retirement income provision and a short and focused review of the Mexican pension system. The review covers all components of the pension system: public and private pension provision for public and private-sector workers. It provides recommendations, using OECD’s best practices in pension design, on how to improve the Mexican pension system and thus ameliorate the retirement income that people may receive from the pension system.