Introduction: Plan México as an opportunity for innovation-led, inclusive and sustainable growth
Plan México, published in January 2025, marks a shift in Mexico’s development strategy by placing prosperidad compartida (shared prosperity) at its core. The plan aims to raise investment above 25 per cent of GDP and distribute growth gains across people, firms, and territories. It builds on gains between 2018 and 2024, where the real minimum wage rose by 116.4 per cent and multidimensional poverty fell from 41.9 to 29.6 per cent. However, the report notes that the labour share of income remains low at approximately 32 per cent, and more than half of employment is informal.

Mexico’s economic challenges
Mexico faces significant structural constraints. Real GDP growth slowed from 3.7 per cent in 2022 to 1.5 per cent in 2024, with an estimate of 0.5 per cent in 2025. Public physical investment fell by 28.4 per cent in real terms in 2025, reaching 2.2 per cent of GDP, among the lowest levels in decades. The productive structure is highly polarised; micro-enterprises comprise 95.4 per cent of establishments but contribute only 16.0 per cent of value added, while large firms represent 0.2 per cent of establishments but account for 54.3 per cent of value added. The financial system provides limited support to production, with manufacturing receiving less than one-fifth of business lending. Additionally, R&D spending declined to 0.26 per cent of GDP in 2022, the lowest in the OECD.

A mission-oriented approach to implementation
The report recommends translating Plan México’s targets into five mission areas: upgrading domestic productive capacity, water security, health for all, energy sovereignty, and food sovereignty. A cross-government mission board should be established to coordinate delivery across these portfolios, bringing together the Secretaría de Hacienda y Crédito Público (SHCP), sectoral ministries, development banks, and social partners. This board should hold decision-making power to align budgets, resolve bottlenecks, and publish portfolio evaluations.

Aligning macroeconomic policy with sustainable, inclusive, innovation-led growth
Macroeconomic policy must support rather than constrain transformation. Fiscal rules should be redesigned to recognise assets and productive capabilities created by investment. Mexico’s tax revenue, at 17.7 per cent of GDP in 2023, is the lowest in the OECD. The report suggests broadening the revenue base through progressive measures, such as wealth, inheritance, property, and financial-sector taxes, to finance necessary infrastructure and capabilities.

Governing for public value: aligning public and private actors
Delivering public value requires aligning both state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and private firms with national goals. Mandates for SOEs like CFE, Pemex, and CONAGUA should embed Plan México’s targets. For private firms, public support should include enforceable conditions related to productive investment, domestic supplier development, technology transfer, and decent work. The report cites the US CHIPS and Science Act as an example of attaching conditions to semiconductor subsidies.

Directing finance: building a coordinated development-finance system
Mexico’s development banks, including NAFIN and Banobras, should be coordinated as a system under SHCP stewardship. Currently, 67.0 per cent of NAFIN credit is placed through commercial intermediaries. The report recommends shifting towards direct lending to ensure credit reaches productive activity rather than subsidising bank margins, and evaluating banks by their additionality and transformational impact.

Harnessing public purchasing power: from minimising cost to creating public value
Public procurement, currently at 5.3 per cent of GDP compared to an OECD average of 12.9 per cent, should be used as a strategic demand-side tool. The report recommends targeting 50 per cent of procurement from national production and attaching public-value conditions to contracts. In the health sector, this involves setting quantified targets for domestic supply of vaccines and pharmaceuticals through aggregated demand.

Dynamic capabilities: from compliance to learning, adapting, and experimenting
Successful implementation depends on building public-sector capabilities. This includes establishing a government-housed civil-service training capability and a permanent public innovation lab to encourage risk-taking and experimentation. Digital public infrastructure should be treated as a core capability to ensure interoperability across ministries and address the digital divide, where connectivity in states like Oaxaca is only 55.5 per cent.

Governing for true bienestar: co-creation and participation with local knowledge
Participation should be embedded throughout mission design and delivery. The report highlights Iztapalapa’s Utopias, which provided services to eight million users and reduced perceptions of insecurity, as a model for people-centred delivery. Co-creation ensures that local and tacit knowledge improves the selection and durability of projects beyond top-down planning.

Testing mission-oriented delivery through sandboxes
The report proposes using the restoration of the Tula basin as a mission sandbox to test delivery tools. This requires coordinating finance from Banobras, NAFIN, and FIRA, and using outcome-oriented procurement for projects such as wastewater treatment and irrigation modernisation for 200,000 hectares. Intermediate milestones should be tracked via a public-value dashboard.

Conclusion
Mexico has set a clear direction with Plan México. Achieving its ambitions requires a state transformation capable of coordinating across government, shaping markets around public goals, and mobilising investment towards a model of innovation-led, inclusive, and sustainable growth where prosperity is built through productive transformation.