Resource Governance Index: 2019 Interim Evaluation Reports for Mexico
Find more information, including the underlying data and justifications of Mexico's interim evaluation, on the Resource Governance Index website.
Key messages
- Governance of the Mexican mining sector remains weak, scoring an overall 58 points in this interim assessment, which uses the Resource Governance Index methodology. Its score is three points short of that in the 2017 RGI.
- Mexico has improved revenue management in mining, showing some advances in policy areas related to national budgeting and subnational revenue sharing. To maintain the momentum, good reporting practices shown by the Ministry of Finance should be must mainstreamed at the subnational level.
- The mining sector’s weakest component is “value realization”—policy areas related to licensing, taxation, and local impacts.
- The Mexican oil and gas sector has achieved marginal improvements in governance, scoring a “satisfactory” overall performance in this interim evaluation. Its score of 70 out of 100 points represents a two-point increase compared with its 2017 score.
- Mexico scored in the “weak” band for governance of local impacts of its oil sector. The strongest area in the oil assessment’s value realization component was taxation.
The following reports present the Natural Resource Governance Institute’s (NRGI) evaluation of Mexico’s mining, oil and gas governance from 2017 to 2018 according to the methodology set forth in the Resource Governance Index (RGI).
NRGI constructed the RGI using three overarching component topic areas, each representing an aspect of resource governance commonly found in resource-producing countries. The first two components, value realization and revenue management, are based on the chain of decisions governments and societies must make to benefit from natural resources. The third component assesses a country’s enabling environment for good governance in the extractive sector.
Mexico’s mining sector’s overall score was 58 out of 100 points in the 2019 interim assessment. This constitutes a three-point fall from the country’s 2017 RGI score and a move down from the “satisfactory” to the “weak” RGI performance band. Mexico’s oil and gas sector scores 70 out of 100 points in the interim assessment. This is a “satisfactory” score, according to the RGI performance band classification, just five points short of a “good” classification. Mexico has earned a two-point increase from its 2017 assessment and has showed improvement in its implementation of rules relating to hydrocrabons.
A score of only 49 on the value realization component, which assesses policy areas relating to licensing, taxation, and local impact, brought down the oil sector’s overall performance. In this component, Mexico noticeably backslid in comparison to the 2017 RGI scores, especially on the licensing and local impact subcomponents. Policy makers and civil society actors should analyze and address a performance dip in all policy areas within a single component. On the other hand, in the value realization component, Mexico’s oil and gas sector achieves a satisfactory score of 74 points. It earned a good score for its revenue management with 76 points.