MINT - Mexico

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Documentary, Society & Culture

4.3 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 7 January 2014

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Mexico's hope of becoming the workshop of North America was shattered by China's domination of cheap exports, but recently, the Mexican dream is in sight again. As Beijing opts for "quality not quantity" of growth, companies are returning, drawn by competitive labour and proximity to the US market. Jim O'Neill travels across Mexico to investigate. He discovers that its ambitions now go far beyond cheap manufacturing. But can Mexico's youthful, reforming government overcome the challenges of widespread poverty, crime and a huge number of people living outside the formal economy?

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC World Service. My name's Jim O'Neill. I'm an economist and about 12 years ago, I came
0:06.2	up with an acronym you might have heard of, BRICS, BRICS, that's Brazil, Russia, India
0:13.0	and China. Countries I could see that were poised to take their place at the world's
0:18.0	top economic table. Ever since then, people have been repeatedly
0:22.3	asking me where the next economic giants will come from? I reckon I now know the answer,
0:27.8	the Mintz, M-I-N-T, Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey. If the Mintz reached their
0:35.5	potential, they're also going to change the world. So join me now for Mintz, the next
0:40.9	economic giants. Today, it's the M for Mexico.
0:44.5	I'm lost to the heat of the internal dialogue. I'm already in some point of arrival. I'm lost.
0:54.5	So I can't quite believe what I'm seeing here. We're right in the middle of Mexico City
0:58.5	and it's like some kind of massive protest by teachers. And am I right? I'm not complaining
1:04.7	about the fact that they aren't able to hand on their jobs to their kids.
1:08.5	Yeah, because of the new education and reforms, they can sell anymore their positions to their
1:14.3	sons or to anyone else. They've been on strike.
1:18.0	I mean, this is another tough challenge the president has got, because if they're protesting
1:23.7	about something as basic as you just cannot hand on, they're right to your family to be a teacher.
1:30.2	Exactly.
1:31.4	Tough job.
1:34.9	bizarre. I'm learning from a Mexican translator, but until recently, the teaching profession
1:40.3	in this country could be sort of hereditary. To most of us, a new law to change that had
1:46.2	seemed fair enough. Not here, it seems.
1:48.8	You know, this is a reflection about the whole fight against capitalism, private money and
	...

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