Oil Neoliberalism in Mexico's Foreign Economic Policy

Abstract

The objective of the article is to analyze the importance that neoliberalism has had as a development policy for Mexico and a commercial and sovereign element for the country and its oil industry, from the results compared with the Import Substitution Industrialization policy applied in the forty years prior to its application. For this analysis, the amount of reserves, production, exports and imports of crude and derived products, in quantity, income and expenses, as well as the international oil price and the alternative policies proposed by the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador were compared. As a result, the paper found that neoliberalism increased production and reserves and -in the first instance- also revenues, but over time also increased imports of refined and chemical products and decreased revenues making the company, beside with the structural reforms of 2013, a kind of oil cluster. For that reason, President López Obrador proposed changing the oil system and returning to the resource protection policy as a sovereign element, although analysts do not agree with the first actions of his government.