Oil and Prosperity: Reforming Mexico's Petroleum Monopoly

Publication Date: December 1992

Publisher: Heritage Foundation (Washington, D.C.)

Author(s): Wesley R. Smith

Research Area: Energy

Keywords: Latin American

Type: Report

Coverage: Mexico

Abstract:

For over half a century, Mexico’s oil monopoly, PEMEX, has reigned over that country’s oil industry. During that time, a large and diversified petroleum industry has been developed, and PEMEX’s supporters hail its accomplishments as legitimation of the economic nationalism which prompted the 1938 nationalization of the oil industry. Unmentioned by these supporters, however, are PEMEX’s extensive failings and the enormous costs at which its accomplishments have been purchased. The belief that a state-owned monopoly such as PEMEX can be cost-free or even beneficial to the wider economy is a fiction which can no longer be sustained.