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Mexican election authorities finally declared on Thursday that the winner of its close election Sunday is the conservative Felipe Calderon.

His rival Andres Manuel Lopez-Obrador of the Democratic Revolution Party

disputed the count and plans to fight the election results in court.

Director of the Project on Global Economic Liberty, Ian Vasquez, is here to sift through the confusion.

The election results in Mexico were extremely close.

How do you explain this?

Mexicans were being asked to choose between two candidates that offered very different visions of the future of Mexico.

One, Felipe Caledron, offered a modern vision of Mexico with more competition, with less rigid regulation, with more competition with less rigid regulation with more openness

pursuing more free trade. The other Andres Manuel Lopez-Obrador of the PRD

was offering a populist solution of the kind that put the state at the center of economic development of the kind where the government would be increasing spending exactly the kinds of things that have failed Mexico in the 20th century and one of the

reasons why the election was so close was because Mexicans in the past six years

under the presidency of Vicente Fox have not seen much in the way of economic growth.

Growth has been under 2% per year on average during the Vicente Fox administration.

And so many Mexicans have thought that the reforms under Fox

simply did not help them and they want to opt for a different alternative.

And I think that that's the lesson of Mexico that reforms have not been deep enough.

The great achievement of Fox in the past six years has been to get economic stability of the kind not seen in more than 30 years, but that's simply not enough.

Look at Mexico and you'll find real rigidities in the economy, you'll find private and public

monopolies in telecommunications and energy and

...