“…By 2000, the neoliberal paradigm of the Mexican federal government was dominant in pensions and antipoverty policies. At that time, the main federal social program was a conditional cash transfer (CCT) only to the extreme poor households and its design stressed the neoliberal values of efficiency, conditionality, and targeting the poorest (Luccisano, 2006;Molyneux, 2007Molyneux, , 2008Sandoval, 2015), which was considered an intrusive and interventionist because of the "prevalence of micro-conditionalities to regulate the behaviour of the poor" (Ruckert, 2009: 56). While CCTs with educational conditions are classified as a social investment approach policy (Palier, Garritzmann & Häusermann, 2022), they did not necessarily constitute a break from neoliberal cannons, but rather an evolved measure from classic neoliberalism (Mahon, 2010;Molyneux, 2007), particularly in the case of the Mexican version, which had a strong emphasis on the aforementioned principles and was, therefore, labelled as a "neo-liberal social investment program" (Luccisano, 2006).…”