The businessman and billionaire Carlos Slim He referred this Wednesday to “extreme poverty” as Mexico’s biggest problem in a ceremony in which he received the Doctor Honoris Causa distinction from the Anáhuac University.
Slim commented that, “hopefully in this six-year term extreme poverty will be eliminated, Coneval says there are around six or eight million people,” this is because it is one of the challenges that the administration of President Claudia Sheinbaum.
The National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (Coneval) revealed in August 2023 that Mexico reduced its number of poor by 8.9 million to a total of 46.8 million people, almost 16% less than the 55.7 million in 2020.
During the event, held in the auditorium of the private university, Slim insisted on several occasions on the importance of ending extreme poverty and highlighted it as the most important task to be addressed in Mexico, not only on an ethical and moral level but also for the economic functioning of the nation.
“It is absurd that extreme poverty exists, it must be eliminated, the best investment that can be made by the government and by us is to eliminate this extreme poverty,” he stressed.
The billionaire mentioned and lamented the low salaries that still exist in Mexico today, despite the economic growth that the country experienced until the 2000s and which has been reduced in the last 20 years.
“It is a country that unfortunately, despite the many opportunities it has had in the last six or seven governments, continues with very low levels of income per person, we are still at 12,000 or so dollars, we have grown at 6.2% for 49 years and after that 6.2 we have fallen to 1.9%, since 2000 we have been growing at 1.3%, that is, we grow the same as the population, it is a minuscule growth for a country like Mexico”he detailed.
However, he also highlighted the opportunities that the country offers and emphasized ‘nearshoring’, an outsourcing strategy by which a company transfers part of its production to third parties that, despite being located in other countries, are located in nearby destinations and with a similar time zone, in the case of Mexico with its neighbor the United States.
After the intervention of the award-winning Slim, the rector of the Anáhuac University, Cipriano Sánchez García, explained the reasons that have led his institution to grant such a distinction to the businessman, among which he highlighted his “commitment to the progress of Mexico” and the impact legacy to his family and the future generations of the country.
The last name Slim generated some controversy this Wednesday when some criticisms made about him by the Nobel Prize winners in Economics Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson came to light, who pointed out in their book that the Mexican magnate did not accumulate his fortune through innovation, as happens in other economic contexts, but through exclusive contracts.
“Carlos Slim is an ambitious and talented man, of relatively humble origins, coming from a family of Lebanese immigrants, who has been a master at obtaining exclusive contracts. He managed to monopolize the lucrative telecommunications market in Mexico and, later , expanded its reach to the rest of Latin America”, mention the economists, who thus call into question the enrichment of the businessman.
Slim is the richest person in Mexico and also in all of Latin Americabetween 2010 and 2013 it became global according to Forbes, and its business conglomerate covers numerous industries and services, notably in telecommunications in various American countries.
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