In this book, the dynamics of continuity and change in the regional economic development of Mexico and the US border states are analyzed. These studies cover the last 25 years, after the first trade agreement, between a developed and a developing country, tooks place, and where international trade and investment have been combined with a set of relevant local factors such as regional innovation, industrialization patterns, multinational corporations’ modes of operation, public investment, and national content of exports. The book offers researchers a precise identification of stylized facts that characterize the pattern of regional development in Mexico and the US Southwest as well as state-of-the-art applications contrasting hypotheses from new economic geography, endogenous and neo-Schumpeterian economic growth models, and new international trade. To graduate and advanced undergraduate students in the fields of spatial geographic economics, this book offers an excellent source for its updated review of current topics on regional development in Mexico. To policy makers, the book helps to identify policy areas to reinforce the dynamics of regional development. Whereas other books have looked at the several impacts of NAFTA on national economies, productive sectors, and societies, this book analyzes the trade agreement’s impact with a long-term view across the diversity of developments of Mexico ́s regions. As well, the analysis is carried out with the perspective of prospective reforms of a renovated trade agreement between the United States and the new Mexican federal administration . The collaborators in this book are researchers who are experts at the international and national levels in the field of regional economic development. During the last 25 years they have conducted their analyses in different regions of Mexico and the United States as university researchers, advisors to state and federal governments, and as practitioners.

In this book, the dynamics of continuity and change in the regional economic development of Mexico and the US border states are analyzed. These studies cover the last 25 years, after the first trade agreement, between a developed and a developing country, tooks place, and where international trade and investment have been combined with a set of relevant local factors such as regional innovation, industrialization patterns, multinational corporations' modes of operation, public investment, and national content of exports. The book offers researchers a precise identification of stylized facts that characterize the pattern of regional development in Mexico and the US Southwest as well as state-of-the-art applications contrasting hypotheses from new economic geography, endogenous and neo-Schumpeterian economic growth models, and new international trade. To graduate and advanced undergraduate students in the fields of spatial geographic economics, this book offers an excellent source for its updated review of current topics on regional development in Mexico. To policy makers, the book helps to identify policy areas to reinforce the dynamics of regional development. Whereas other books have looked at the several impacts of NAFTA on national economies, productive sectors, and societies, this book analyzes the trade agreement's impact with a long-term view across the diversity of developments of Mexico ́s regions. As well, the analysis is carried out with the perspective of prospective reforms of a renovated trade agreement between the United States and the new Mexican federal administration. The collaborators in this book are researchers who are experts at the international and national levels in the field of regional economic development. During the last 25 years they have conducted their analyses in different regions of Mexico and the United States as university researchers, advisors to state and federal governments, and as practitioners.

Diploma Thesis from the year 2004 in the subject Economics - Foreign Trade Theory, Trade Policy, grade: 1,3 (A), European Business School - International University Schloß Reichartshausen Oestrich-Winkel (Economic Policy and Political Economy), language: English, abstract: In January 1994, after two and a half years of negotiation, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into force. The treaty between Canada, Mexico and the United States has created the largest economic area in the world, slightly surpassing the European Union in market size. But NAFTA is also outstanding in a second aspect: it has constituted the first major regional integration arrangement between two highly developed countries, the United States and Canada, and a developing country, Mexico. The North-South nature of North American integration has polarized the debate about NAFTA from the earliest stage on. On the one hand it was unclear how much the U.S. would gain from the agreement. Would it stabilize its southern neighbor and thus benefit the U.S. economically and politically? Or would it cause the “giant sucking sound” Ross Perot feared, drawing thousands of jobs from the U.S. over the border (Thorbecke/Eigen-Zucchi 2002, p. 648)? Regarding these concerns, Canada was at most a side-player, possessing neither intense trade relations nor geographical proximity to Mexico. Mexico’s gains from NAFTA, on the other hand, seemed even more unsure. The agreement’s effects on the southern member state, whether positive or negative, were expected to be unequally greater than on the U.S. On the one hand, it seemed, Mexico could gain immensely through improved access to the North American market, increasing trade, attracting foreign investment, and importing growth and stability. On the other hand, some trade economists, such as Arvind Panagaria (1996, pp. 512-513) warned that Mexico could only lose when opening its market to its powerful northern neighbors, while receiving little in return that it would not have obtained anyway. Furthermore, would Mexico’s move towards regional integration hamper any further step into the direction of multilateral opening, after promising reforms had been started in the mid-1980s? Concerns also regarded the adverse effects of NAFTA within Mexico. These centered around large adjustment costs from sectoral restructuring and resource reallocation. This would occur if inefficient, partly subsidized Mexican industries declined after removing tariffs and non-tariff barriers, allowing the North American competition to enter the national market. In addition, would this hit mostly those Mexican regions that were poor anyway?

This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of the impact of NAFTA on growth and business cycles in Mexico. The effect of the agreement in spurring a dramatic increase in trade and financial flows between Mexico and its NAFTA partners, and its impact on Mexican economic growth and business cycle dynamics, are documented with reference both to stylized facts and recent empirical research. The paper concludes by drawing lessons from Mexico's NAFTA experience for policymakers in developing countries. The foremost of these is that in an increasingly globalized trading system, bilateral and regional free trade arrangements should be used to accelerate, rather than postpone, needed structural reform.

With the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) looming large and imminent, this book explores the socio-economic fabric of the U.S.-Mexico border region as a measure of NAFTA's future. It presents the social and economic history of the Lower Rio Grande Valley on the Texas-Mexico border. .