Having reached the half-way point of his administration, Jalisco Governor Aristoteles Sandoval is expected to paint a rosy picture of the state’s economic progress in his third annual report (informe) Tuesday, February 1.
Despite a weak peso and plunging oil prices, Sandoval believes Jalisco has plenty to boast about.
During his address, he will highlight the 85,000 jobs created in 2015, representing a 15-year high for Jalisco. The governor will also take credit for $US1.9 billion in direct investment in the state, the largest figure for 11 years.
Sandoval will stress his government’s commitment to turning Jalisco into the country’s most innovative state. With almost perfect timing, work has just started on the first building of the Creative Digital City (Ciudad Creativa Digital), a high-tech hub that aims to lure multimedia firms to the city’s historic downtown.
Another area Sandoval is likely to play up during his address on Tuesday, February 2 is Jalisco’s success in farming, with the state now responsible for 11 percent of the nation’s agricultural GDP.
Nonetheless, positive data should always be offset against the social impact and improvements in standards of living, most economists will say. In this regard, Sandoval will no doubt highlight data from Coneval (National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy) that shows Jalisco as the state with most success in lifting people out of extreme poverty.
While Sandoval can point to the ambitious and costly project to build a third subway line as evidence of his commitment to improving Guadalajara’s transportation infrastructure, he will find it harder to explain the delays in implementing changes to the city’s failing bus network, and the seemingly impossible task of introducing a simple electronic payment system similar to those used in major cities around the world for more than a decade.
The governor will also need creative ways of persuading citizens that public security in the state has improved under his watch. The population remains skeptical of stats that appear to show crime dropping and are skeptical that much is being done to reduce the influence of organized crime in municipal town halls throughout the state.
Worsening air pollution in metro area Guadalajara is another issue the state government will need to act on in a more aggressive manner over the next three years. The city’s atmosphere is now considered dirtier than Mexico City and the announced changes to the ineffective vehicle emissions testing program will need to be seen to work.
As in previous years, the governor’s annual informe will be followed by three days of intense scrutiny. On Wednesday, February 3, Sandoval will be forced to listen as representatives from civic society make their observations about the details of his report (this is known as the Glosa Ciudadana). Then on Thursday, February 4 and Friday, February 5, Sandoval’s cabinet secretaries will face a public grilling from state legislators regarding the major themes of the informe.