Mexico City. Photo: Yetto (flickr)

Are the southern states of Mexico – Chiapas, Guerrero and Oaxaca – getting left out of Mexico's economic growth?

An April 24 article in the Economist suggests that there is a growing socio-economic gap between these three southern states and the rest of Mexico. In 2000, Mexico’s GDP per capita was $7,495, compared to a combined average of $3,634 for Chiapas, Guerrero and Oaxaca, according to a World Bank report. Furthermore, the percentage of people living in extreme poverty – less than $1 a day – was 54-56 percent in the south, compared to 23-25 percent nationwide.

Recently, the government has proposed using large-scale infrastructure projects to address this economic disparity.

In 2001, then-President Vicente Fox released his Plan Puebla Panamá, a project to link southern Mexico and Central America with northern Mexico. It primarily provides funding for building highways and new air and sea ports.

More recently, current President Felipe Calderón announced plans for a six-year, $28.7-billion road investment project. A significant part of the plan focuses on southern coastal regions.

Critics argue that investing in infrastructure isn’t enough to promote economic growth in the south. José Antonio Aguilar, a government official from the state of Puebla (another southern state), tells The Economist that they have experienced “a total transformation” in state infrastructure "but we haven’t been able to turn this into growth in income." Likewise, Miguel Pickard for CorpWatch.org worries that these top-down approaches tend to overlook Mexico’s poor.

To what extent will these ambitious infrastructure projects close Mexico's north-south poverty gap?