Foxonomics.

• Author: SMITH, ELLIOT BLAIR
• Position: Vicente Fox - Statistical Data Included

Mexico's new president has a sharp economics team in place. Can they deliver sustained prosperity?

One day in November, the side door of Mexico City's San Carlos Museum swung open and Vicente Fox strode in on a beam of sunlight. Mexico's charismatic president-elect--then eleven days from taking the oath of office and ending the seventy-one-year monolithic rule of the center-left Revolutionary Institutional Party (RPI)--arrived to introduce his new cabinet.

Likened to the Marlboro cowboy of billboard fame for his 6-foot-4-inch frame, boots, moustache and sun-crinkled eyes, Fox is a large man with large ambitions. As the standard bearer of the center-right National Action Party, he campaigned for the country's highest office by promising to deliver a conservative revolution of honest government, fiscal reform, and accelerated globalization of the world's eleventh largest economy. He sold himself as an old-fashioned "rancher in love with his country," and as a Harvard MBA with innovative new ideas on how to lead his country of ninety-eight million people.

Standing on one side of the president-elect, this day, was the leftist intellectual Jorge Castaneda, 47, who, a dozen years earlier, co-authored a critical book of essays on the relationship between the United States and Mexico, Limits to Friendship. Retracing his father's former footsteps, Castaneda was introduced as Mexico's new foreign secretary.

On Fox's other side, resembling the Grim Reaper, was the tall, thin, aloof-looking Francisco Gil Diaz, 56, chief executive of Mexico's independent long-distance telephone company, Avantel. Gil Diaz was introduced as Fox's new secretary of finance. Revered as a fiscal hawk in prior administrations, he would be the man to sell the federal government's $141 billion budget and assure Wall Street that the pending change in governments was one Mexican revolution that would not panic financial markets.

Fox, a master of outsize symbols that resonate with Mexico's educated and illiterate alike, waxed enthusiastic about his new team. Gil Diaz spoke also. But, in presenting his best imitation of the cryptic Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Gil Diaz made amorphous arguments about placing Mexico on a path of "sustained economic growth" that were all but unintelligible to his audience and more appropriate to an economics textbook.

If Gil Diaz's introduction that day was short on style and long-winded on substance, his next appearance awkwardly reversed course. A few weeks later, in one of his first official pronouncements, the finance secretary claimed to have discovered 300 phantom employees--known in Mexican parlance as "fliers"--on the ministry payroll. On closer review, Gil Diaz sheepishly acknowledged these were not criminal beneficiaries of a padded payroll under the former government but Fox-transition employees who never were intended to become payroll fixtures. "I was misinformed," Gil Diaz said.

Between the Fox administration's Greenspanlike mumbles and J. Edgar Hoover-like boasts, here's what "Foxonomics" likely means for Mexico: disciplined spending that targets the...