Each record describes something a country built that the indicators do not capture. The source provides the published number; the mechanism is our interpretation.
Scores describe outcomes. These records describe how a country acted, what it needed and what happened. 742 of 742 records include a mechanism. They do not affect scores.
Mexico's communications ministry operated Puntos Mรฉxico Conectado centres in all 32 states, reporting more than 410,000 enrolled members and over 260,000 course enrolments by June 2017.
The communications ministry put free digital classrooms in every state, then used equipment and curriculum partnerships with firms such as Samsung to turn connectivity points into places where people could practise new tools.
Preconditions
A national network of staffed community centres rather than connectivity alone
Public funding for access and instructors across all states
Private partners willing to provide current equipment and course material
Where else it has been used: Digital-learning hubs travel when the state supplies trusted physical access and partners refresh the content; registrations without completion data should not be mistaken for population-wide proficiency.
Limits: The ministry reports registrations and course enrolments, not a comparable adult-skills test, completion rate or retained ability. The article is a programme announcement about a partnership and does not establish how many of the 410,000 members completed training or whether the network continued at that scale after 2017.
Mexico's labour ministry linked young people to more than half a million registered workplaces for on-the-job training, reporting 2.95 million beneficiaries nationwide after five years of Jรณvenes Construyendo el Futuro in February 2024.
The labour ministry paid a stipend and social insurance while firms, shops and civil-society organisations supplied real work placements, with a shared digital platform matching young people to host workplaces.
Preconditions
A public payment and insurance system able to support people outside formal employment
A large enough network of employers willing to host and report trainees
A matching and inspection platform that gives the state visibility over placements
Where else it has been used: Workplace guarantees travel when the state underwrites the first months and employers provide the learning environment; the transferable component is the matching and verification loop, not the stipend size.
Limits: The ministry's total is a cumulative programme count and the workplace figure is rounded; neither shows unique completions, the quality of mentoring or whether trainees stayed employed. The government funds the stipend and insurance, so the record demonstrates a large public-private delivery interface rather than private financing of the programme.
Mexico's Instituto Nacional para la Educaciรณn de los Adultos certified 651,473 young people and adults as having completed a level of literacy, primary or secondary education in 2024, with 352,600 learners in its services at the close of the year.
A federal institute and state adult education institutes run a semi-open model in which volunteers with a small stipend tutor adults in community spaces, and learners sit module examinations when ready, so a credential can be earned without a classroom timetable.
Preconditions
A modular curriculum and an examination system recognised as equivalent to school certificates
A large network of subsidised volunteer tutors and community learning spaces
Federal and state co-financing, since delivery runs through state institutes
Where else it has been used: The semi-open, examination-at-will model resembles Brazil's ENCCEJA and Spain's adult graduation tests. The Mexican case shows the dependence on volunteer tutors, whose numbers rise and fall with the stipend budget.
Limits: The figures are INEA reporting on itself from its own tracking system (SASA). A completed level is a credential, often obtained by examination after self-study, and says nothing about how much was learned; one person can complete more than one level in a year. Against 27.5 million people aged 15 and over who, by the same document, have not finished basic education, a year's completions are about two percent of the backlog. The same document's indicator series shows completions fell sharply in 2019 and 2020 and rebounded from 2021, and it notes a fall in people served in 2024; chaining those published rates back from the 538,741 completions the document gives for 2023 puts 2019 at about 680,000 and 2018 at about 853,000, so 2024 is below both, by about 4 and 24 percent (our computation, from rounded rates).
Mexico's medicines and health-products regulator COFEPRIS completed 509,921 procedures entirely online with traceability by 5 September 2024, replacing paper hand-offs for a large share of its regulated users.
The regulator converted submission, tracking and completion into one traceable digital workflow, so applicants could see a case move without physically carrying documents between offices.
Preconditions
A regulator with authority to make its own procedural systems mandatory
Document and identity standards that can be checked electronically
A case-management system able to expose status without exposing protected data
Where else it has been used: Digital regulatory workflows travel when traceability is designed into the case record; moving a form online without a visible status trail leaves the old bottleneck intact.
Limits: COFEPRIS publishes the number of completed digital procedures but not a before-and-after median processing time, rejection rate or compliance outcome. It is a regulator's own operational tally, and the article does not establish that every procedure type or every applicant could use the digital path.
๐ฒ๐ฝMexicosince 2024delivered and closedbears on Disaster preparedness and recovery
Mexico's national civil-protection system coordinated a countrywide earthquake exercise in September 2024 in which 9,727,000 people participated, with alerts carried over 14,490 public loudspeakers and a multi-agency task force of 1.9 million personnel.
The national protection agency set one scenario, aligned federal, state and municipal responders, pushed the same alert through public infrastructure and used the exercise to expose protocol gaps before a real shock.
Preconditions
A legal civil-protection system linking three government levels
An alert network and emergency command structure that can be tested at once
Schools, workplaces and households willing to participate in a common scenario
Where else it has been used: National drills travel when rehearsal is treated as an operational test rather than a ceremony; participation counts need follow-up on the failures found and fixed.
Limits: A drill records mobilisation and protocol testing, not performance in a real disaster. Participation is self-reported by agencies and organisations, and the loudspeaker count covers only listed jurisdictions; the exercise used a hypothetical earthquake and cannot establish casualty reduction or recovery speed.
๐ฒ๐ฝMexicosince 2014dismantledbears on Institutional responsiveness
Mexico abolished the 2014 decree creating PROSPERA on 31 May 2019 and ordered its people, assets and budget to transfer to the new Benito Juรกrez scholarship coordination within 90 days.
The executive used a new coordinating body and a single transition clause to move PROSPERA's staff, resources and education components into a different delivery model rather than preserve the old agency by inertia.
Preconditions
Central budget and administrative authority over the programme's people and funds
A replacement institution ready to receive the transferred functions
A legal instrument that can abrogate the old mandate and specify a deadline
Where else it has been used: Programme replacement travels when a government can name the receiving institution and fund the handover; a deadline on paper is not evidence that service continuity survived it.
Limits: The decree proves a formal policy and organisational change, not that the 90-day transfer happened on time or that beneficiaries experienced a seamless handover. It also does not compare PROSPERA's outcomes with the replacement scholarships, and the transition combined a programme redesign with a change in political administration.
๐ฒ๐ฝMexicosince 1999dismantledbears on Disaster preparedness and recovery
Mexico's federal government ran FONDEN from 1999 as a pre-arranged national fund for post-disaster reconstruction, allocating a record US$833 million to it in 2011 and insuring it with catastrophe bonds, and abrogated the FONDEN trust by the decree of 6 November 2020, moving disaster spending onto ordinary budget lines.
The Finance Ministry and the Interior Ministry built a rules-based trust that set aside budget for reconstruction before disasters and reinsured it through catastrophe bonds. A new administration and Congress then folded the trust into ordinary budget lines through a decree converting it into a budgetary scheme, justified by transparency.
Preconditions
A trust structure that could be extinguished by decree
An administration that treated off-budget trusts as a corruption risk rather than as insurance
No statutory floor that protected the reserve once the trust was gone
Where else it has been used: FONDEN's design, an ex-ante disaster fund topped up by parametric catastrophe bonds, was promoted by the World Bank as a template.
Limits: The metric shows the fund at its peak, not its dismantling. The abolition rests on a second World Bank document with no number in it: the Mexico Inclusive and Sustainable Economic Growth DPL (P178224, https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/556411654274244589/pdf/Mexico-Inclusive-and-Sustainable-Economic-Growth-Development-Policy-Loan.pdf) refers to "the abrogation of the Mexico's National Disaster Fund (FONDEN)" (page 31), and the government's own letter in its annex says that after "the Decree published on 6 November 2020, the financial instrument FONDEN is changing from a trust to a budgetary scheme". So disaster spending did not stop. What ended was the trust, its reserve-building and its inter-institutional rules, and the same DPL says the 2022 emergency budget covered only an average year's losses. The record has no post-abolition figure for reconstruction spending or speed, so the claim that capacity fell is the World Bank's reading, not a measurement. The 2011 allocation is one year inside a volatile series. The same review says spending exceeded FONDEN's resources in five of the years from 1999 to 2011 and needed transfers of over US$3.3 billion in 2010, so the fund was never fully self-sufficient. The review was co-authored with the Mexican government it describes.
Mexico built public health insurance for people outside social security from 2003 and abolished it in 2020, and CONEVAL measured the share of the population without access to health services rising from 16.2 percent in 2018 to 39.1 percent in 2022.
The abolition is the mechanism recorded here: a new government replaced a funded, enrolment-based entitlement with a budget-line service that required no affiliation, and affiliation-based coverage disappeared faster than the replacement could deliver care.
Preconditions
A programme identified with the previous political coalition, which made it removable
Centralised budget authority able to redirect earmarked health funds
No statutory or constitutional floor under the entitlement
Where else it has been used: The replacement, INSABI, was itself dissolved in 2023 and replaced by IMSS-Bienestar, the second replacement in four years. The case travels as a warning: an entitlement without a legal floor is one election from removal.
Limits: The metric measures the dismantling, not the programme: CONEVAL's deprivation number is self-reported affiliation, not care received, and Seguro Popular at its peak was itself criticised for shallow coverage and uneven state-level spending. The 2018-2022 change spans the pandemic, which stressed every health system, so not all of the 23-point rise is the reform. CONEVAL itself lost autonomy in a later reorganisation, so the continuity of this series is not assured.
๐ฒ๐ฝMexicosince 2019still operatingbears on Large project delivery
Mexico's state telecom operator CFE Telecomunicaciones e Internet para Todos installed 113,683 free public internet sites by September 2024, reaching 81.2 percent of its stated 140,000-site 2025 goal.
A state-owned carrier combined satellite, fibre, copper and mobile contracts with public access points, using a federal operator to reach places commercial networks had not served.
Preconditions
A public operator able to aggregate several access technologies under one programme
Procurement and spectrum arrangements that reach isolated localities
Public facilities where a connection can be installed and maintained
Where else it has been used: Universal-access builds travel when a state carrier can fill commercial gaps, but the last fifth of a numerical rollout target is often the hardest and most expensive part.
Limits: The management report is self-reported and counts installed sites, not uptime, geographic service quality, affordability after the free offer or actual use. The 81.2 percent figure is calculated from the report's installed count and stated goal, and the programme was still short of that goal at the reference date.
๐ฒ๐ฝMexicosince 2014dismantledbears on Large project delivery
Mexico cancelled the partially built Texcoco airport after construction and contracts had begun; the government's 2019 cancellation paper estimated a 100 billion peso cancellation cost, including 60 billion pesos already spent and 40 billion in non-recoverable commitments.
100,000,000,000 Mexican pesos, government estimate of cancellation cost, 2019-04-26. 60,000,000,000 Mexican pesos, construction expenditure already incurred at cancellation, 2019-04-26. Grupo Aeroportuario de la Ciudad de Mรฉxico, Government of Mexico, retrieved 2026-09-02.
The move, and what it needed
A new administration stopped a politically contested megaproject, terminated contracts and redirected the airport strategy to a different site, accepting sunk costs in exchange for a different delivery path.
Preconditions
Executive authority over the state airport holding company and the federal investment plan
A contracting and bond framework that permits negotiated termination
An alternative site and delivery institution available before the old project was abandoned
Where else it has been used: Stopping a megaproject travels as a governance option only when the government can disclose the sunk-cost trade-off and still offer a credible replacement; otherwise cancellation becomes delay with a bill attached.
Limits: The 100 billion peso figure is the government's own estimate and excludes or treats differently the financing and legal costs that later audits and congressional analyses debated. Cancellation is evidence of a project running backwards and of a political decision to change course, not evidence that the replacement airport delivered better value or schedule performance.
๐ฒ๐ฝMexicosince 2019still operatingbears on Large project delivery
Pemex built the Olmeca refinery at Dos Bocas, authorized in December 2018 and fully operational from February 2025, under an authorized budget of US$15,963.0 million, 79 percent above the US$8,918.5 million Class IV estimate stated when its board authorized the FEL II phase in July 2020.
The federal government chose a greenfield refinery as a political flagship and had Pemex deliver it through a dedicated subsidiary, PTI Infraestructura de Desarrollo, funded through equity contributions from Pemex Industrial Transformation (2020 to 2023). The board re-authorized the scope and budget mid-construction in August 2022.
Preconditions
A state oil company able to absorb repeated capital contributions outside the normal investment appraisal
Political commitment strong enough to keep funding through cost rebaselining
A site and licensor package secured before front-end engineering was complete
Limits: Pemex is the state oil company reporting on its own project. The filing is made under US securities law and carries legal liability, but it is not an audit, and Mexico's audit office (ASF) is not reachable from outside Mexico to check against. The publisher is a state enterprise, not a ministry or statistics office, so a strict reading of the publisher rule could exclude it. The 79 percent overrun is our computation from two figures that do not measure the same thing. The Class IV estimate excludes external works, escalation, contingency and administrative costs and carries a stated range of +30 to -25 percent, while the later budget includes VAT. A share of the gap is therefore a change of definition and not an overrun. The government's original public figure, around US$8 billion, appears only in press reports and is not used here. The schedule is shown only by the issuer's own changing expectations. The FY2025 filing (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0000932782/000093278226000006/ck0000932782-20251231.htm) says the refinery "has been fully operational since February 2025". No filing states an original completion date to measure the slip against. Full operation is a claim about start-up, not about utilisation or margins, which the FY2025 filing excludes from its refining margin series.