(Page 19 of 22) - Deconcentration versus Devolution of Water Management in Mexico: Inferences from the Rio Bravo (Rio Grande) Basin authored by Donnell, Howard.

federal expenditure falls during the Salinas sexenio, from 0.005 in 1989 to a mere 0.001
in 1993 and 1994, well below the ratio of state to federal expenditures in every year
except 1990. During the crisis-ridden first year of the Zedillo administration, 1995, both
ratios were just 0.002, while the municipal to federal ratio actually outstripped the state to
federal ratio between 1996 and 1998, though this last year witnessed a decline for both.
However, reflecting the change noted in Figures 5 and 6, the last two years of the time
series—1999 and 2000—witnessed a significant increase in both ratios, especially the
state to federal ratio, which jumped back ahead of the municipal to federal ratio.
Whereas the municipal to federal ratio had stood at 0.010 in 1998 versus the state to
federal ratio’s 0.007, the latter jumped nearly five-fold in a year, to 0.034 in 1999 and
thence to 0.036 in 2000, while the former increased more modestly, to 0.021 in 1999 and
0.023 in 2000. Hence the overall pattern in the ratio of subnational to national
expenditures on water management is one of fluctuations up and down in the decade
between 1989 and 1998, with the ratio ending up 19 percent lower during the period.
However, during the last two years of the Zedillo administration, the ratio grew by a
factor of nearly 3.5, to a high just under 0.06 in 2000, unprecedented at least in the era of
the

CNA

and of the vaunted decentralizing “neoliberal” reforms.

In a recent study of the performance of urban water supply agencies in Mexico’s

northern border states, Pineda (2002) found that location in states that have experienced
alternation of the party holding the governorship (i.e., Baja California, Chihuahua and
Nuevo León), as well as location specifically in border cities, both had statistically
significant positive impacts on average revenue collected per cubic meter of water
produced. Meanwhile, he found that water supply agencies in those border states that
closely adhered to the

CNA

’s recommendations for decentralization-promoting water

supply management legal reforms—Coahuila, Sonora and Tamaulipas—performed
poorer than their counterparts in the other three states (Pineda 2002, 164-67). Hence the
three border states in which the

PRI

has yet to lose a gubernatorial election were the three

most faithfully to adopt the suggested legal reforms, while the three states in which the

PAN

has won at least one term in the governorship (though it has subsequently lost in

Chihuahua and now Nuevo León) made more minor adjustments to their legal
frameworks for water management, yet attained better results. Political competitiveness,
then, is the major independent variable explaining variance in water utility performance,
Pineda argues.

What effect does political competitiveness have on the ratio of autonomous to

dependent revenue in the five Río Bravo Basin states? Extrapolating from Pineda’s
(2002) argument, one would hypothesize that the more competitive the election, the more
states’ and municipalities’ balance sheets will tend to show higher levels of autonomous
revenue in the years following. As Figure 8 demonstrates, however, this pattern does not
hold. Rather, one finds that over the two decades from 1980 to 2000, the lower the
degree of political competitiveness at the gubernatorial level (i.e., the greater the
dominance of the

PRI

), the higher the ratio of autonomous to dependent sources of state

revenue (see Table 1 for gubernatorial election results). In the majority of cases where
the

PRI

was hegemonic (i.e., winning the governorship by a margin of at least 60

percentage points [n = 45 state budget years]) or dominant (i.e., winning by a margin