From State Developmentalism to Financial Populism: The ‘Bank of Welfare' and Mexico’s Moral Economy
Nadine Reis and
Germán Vargas Magaña
Review of Political Economy, 2025, vol. 37, issue 3, 937-964
Abstract:
The Mexican state-owned bank Banco del Bienestar (BB) — Bank of Welfare — has received a lot of attention for its role in the current Government’s ambitious political project to create an ‘alternative to neoliberalism’ and turn Mexico into a ‘moral economy’. This article analyzes the activities of Banco del Bienestar, with special attention to the recent economic crisis induced by the Covid-19 pandemic. We conclude that BB has followed a path from a state developmentalist-corporatist, to a neoliberal, to a postneoliberal, ‘financial populist’ model, under changing political cultures and with an increasing historical importance for state-society relations. The BB currently operates as a government-funded public entity serving the distribution of non-repayable social benefits to large, vulnerable population groups, while maintaining links with financial markets. We interpret this shift from the neoliberal to the financial populist era of public banking as consolidation of a ‘fix’ of neoliberalism’s failures, which is based on the definitive acceptance of the reality of development perspectives of the Global South. ‘Public purpose’ in this context becomes based on a social imaginary where the ‘public’ is comprised of those that are permanently taken care of by the paternalistic state.
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09538259.2024.2319198 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:revpoe:v:37:y:2025:i:3:p:937-964
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CRPE20
DOI: 10.1080/09538259.2024.2319198
Access Statistics for this article
Review of Political Economy is currently edited by Steve Pressman and Louis-Philippe Rochon
More articles in Review of Political Economy from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().