This book provides a full, historical, economic, and political context through which to understand the actions of the people and government of Mexico, and it gives insights into how those actions impinge -- and might continue to impinge -- on the United States.

This book is the first comprehensive and systematic English-language treatment of Mexico's economic history to appear in nearly forty years. Drawing on several years of in-depth research, Juan Carlos Moreno-Brid and Jaime Ros, two of the foremost experts on the Mexican economy, examine Mexico's current development policies and problems from a historical perspective. They review long-term trends in the Mexican economy and analyze past episodes of radical shifts in development strategy and in the role of markets and the state. This book provides an overview of Mexico's economic development since Independence that compares the successive periods of stagnation and growth that alternately have characterized Mexico's economic history. It gives special attention to developments since 1940, and it presents a re-evaluation of Mexico's development policies during the State-led industrialization period from 1940 to 1982 as well as during the more recent market reform process. This reevaluation is critical of the dominant trend in economic literature and is revisionist in arguing that, in particular, the market reforms undertaken by successive Mexican governments since 1983 have not addressed the fundamental obstacles to economic growth. Development and Growth in the Mexican Economy also details the country's pioneering role in launching NAFTA, its membership in the OECD, and its radical macroeconomic reforms. Carefully argued and meticulously researched, the book presents a wide-ranging, authoritative study that not only pinpoints problems, but also suggests solutions for removing obstacles to economic stability and pointing the Mexican economy toward the road to recovery.

Mexico is the fifteenth largest economy in the world and Latin America's biggest exporter and importer. There are, however, two Mexicos: one more prosperous, advanced and modern, the other poor, isolated and backward, and this polarization characterizes much of Mexico's recent economic development. This book charts Mexico's modern economic history as well as its current structure, its regional differences, and the productivity gaps and economic challenges it faces. It examines the relative robustness of recent macroeconomic fundamentals alongside industry-level economic trends, especially those sectors dependent on exports through the North American free trade agreement. The book covers demographic trends, urbanization, education and health, and migration to the North. The economic impact of Mexico's long border with the United States is given particular focus. As are drugs, organized crime and the country's entrenched corruption. The book offers a concise and up to date analysis of Mexico's economic development and the country's political economy suitable for a range of courses in Latin American studies and Development Studies.

Revolution in Development uncovers the surprising influence of postrevolutionary Mexico on the twentieth century's most important international economic institutions. Drawing on extensive archival research in Mexico, the United States, and Great Britain, Christy Thornton meticulously traces how Mexican officials repeatedly rallied Third World leaders to campaign for representation in global organizations and redistribution through multilateral institutions. By decentering the United States and Europe in the history of global economic governance, Revolution in Development shows how Mexican economists, diplomats, and politicians fought for more than five decades to reform the rules and institutions of the global capitalist economy. In so doing, the book demonstrates, Mexican officials shaped not only their own domestic economic prospects but also the contours of the project of international development itself.

For the past century, the anthropological study of the Mexican economy has accentuated the cultural and historical distinctiveness of its subjects, a majority of whom share Amerindian or mestizo identity. By selectively reviewing this record and critically examining specific foundational and later empirical studies in several of Mexico''s key regions, as well as the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and the new trans-border space in the U.S. and Canada for Mexican-origin migrant labor, this book encourages readers to critically rethink their views of economic otherness in Mexico (and, by extension, elsewhere in Latin America and the Third World), and presents a new framework for understanding the Mexican/Mesoamerican economy in world-historical terms. Among other things, this involves reconciling the continuing attraction of concepts like ''penny capitalism'' with the realities of a world ever more subjected to continental and global market projects of ''DOLLAR CAPITALISM.'' It also involves concentrating on the production and consumption of commodity value.The key concept ''commodity culture(s)'' serves as a thread to loosely integrate the separate chapters of this book. It is conceived as a way to operationally immobilize two contradictory tendencies: first, the tendency to understand an economy like Mexico''s as a separate reality from its sociocultural matrix thus distorting its influence; and, second, the tendency to submerge ''economy'' in its sociocultural matrix thereby diffusing its influence. This double immobilization promotes a focus on the interconnectedness of economy, society, and culture, but also makes it possible methodologically to approach themes like cultural survival, subsistence/livelihood security, use value, ecological degradation, human rights, or the sociocultural connectedness of the economy from the perspective of a commodity-focused analysis that privileges use- and exchange-value production and consumption. Such an approach provides a unique perspective in demonstrating how lived experience is informed by and shapes the diversifying funds of knowledge that enable Mexicans under economic stress to make culturally-informed choices in their material interest. The focus on deliberative decision-making, understood as involving utilitarian means-end reasoning necessarily influenced by social and moral considerations, promotes a balanced approach to the economy/culture relationship and to the role of agency in processes of economic transformation. The challenge to economic anthropology in seeking to understand processes of livelihood and accumulation in societies like Mexico with uneven development, persisting cultures of precapitalist origin, yet pervasive involvement in continental and global capitalist markets, is to deal with an unusually diverse array of capital/labor relations, as well as with significant sectors of the rural population with combined, if alternating, involvement in capitalist, petty commodity, and subsistence circuits of value production and consumption. The common denominator of this activity is deliberative choice by Mexicans regarding the acquisition, use, and/or accumulation of commodity value calculated in money terms. This market-responsive behavior, since the early 1980s, has been generated by conditions of subsistence and/or accumulation crisis in Mexico. There is an important message here that should be comforting to those in the United States who are threatened by or uneasy about the growing presence of Mexican migrants in our midst. It should also give pause to others who are quick to emphasize, even exoticize or romanticize, the cultural or ethnic differences between Mexicans and Americans. With regard to fundamental aspirations and considerations related to making and earning a living, including sociopolitical understandings, there is really very little difference between us. Too much has been made in the past of the concrete economic differences between our two countries represented in abstract, statistical terms (or in systemic terms regarding politics/political culture) as an asymmetrical First World-Third World divide. This notion of economic (and political) difference or ''otherness'' has been reinforced by a conflictive and controversial history that has shaped the international border between the U.S. and Mexico, and reverberated in our respective national identities, since the middle of the 19th century. It has also been accentuated by the impersonal, instrumental discourse of international capitalist development which has made ''maquiladora,'' ''indocumentado,'' and ''cheap labor'' household words in both countries. Against this litany of economic (and political) difference, the lesson to be gleaned from the record of study of Mexican/Mesoamerican commodity culture, from the highlands of Guatemala to the Valleys of Oaxaca or Guerrero to the coasts of Veracruz and along the Rio Bravo side of the border, is that its bearers and fashioners, the peoples of this vast region south of the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo, think and act about making and earning their livelihood just as we would in their space. It is this fundamental recognition of our common humanity that should be uppermost in all of our minds as we negotiate and struggle our respective ways together through NAFTAmerica in the twenty-first century.

This book provides a full, historical, economic, and political context through which to understand the actions of the people and government of Mexico, and it gives insights into how those actions impinge -- and might continue to impinge -- on the United States.

Written by two leading scholars, this book provides a detailed analysis of Mexico's political economy. James M. Cypher and Raúl Delgado Wise begin with an examination of Mexico's pivotal economic crisis of the 1980s and the consequent turn toward an export-led economy, later anchored by NAFTA. They show how Mexico, after abandoning frequently successful past practices of state-led development, disastrously tied its future to an unconditional reliance on foreign corporations to promote an export-led growth strategy. Focusing on Mexico's cheap labor export model, the authors use the maquiladora sector and the auto industry as case studies of the perils of globalization—the "race to the bottom" as capital becomes ever more international. The government's unconstrained free-market policies, they convincingly argue, have resulted in a fragmented economy marked by stagnation, falling wages, informal part-time employment, and massive migration, which define daily life for all but a tiny minority.