Author: Richard Snyder
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 184
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Book Description
This volume explores the complex processes of institutional transformation that were unleashed in rural Mexico by the government's massive program of market-oriented economic reforms in the 1990s, creating new pressures for campesinos to make their production choices individually. Instead of paving the way for the triumph of free market forces, neoliberal reforms in rural Mexico tiggered a creative episode of institutional reconstruction and innovation. As a result, instead of focusing on how the old institutions of statism were dismantled, students of rural Mexico should shift their attention to understanding the new institutions that have replaced those destroyed or displaced by the neoliberal reforms.
Author: Gerardo Otero
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
ISBN: 1848137338
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 389
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Book Description
Mexico in Transition provides a wide-ranging, empirical and up-to-date survey of the multiple impacts neoliberal policies have had in practice in Mexico over twenty years, and the specific impacts of the NAFTA Agreement. The volume covers a wide terrain, including the effects of globalization on peasants; the impact of neoliberalism on wages, trade unions, and specifically women workers; the emergence of new social movements El Barzón and the Zapatistas (EZLN); how the environment, especially biodiversity, has become a target for colonization by transnational corporations; the political issue of migration to the United States; and the complicated intersections of economic and political liberalization. Mexico in Transition provides rich concrete evidence of what happens to the different sectors of an economy, its people, and natural resources, as the profound change of direction that neoliberal policy represents takes hold. It also describes and explains the diverse forms of resistance and challenge that different civil-society groups of those affected are now offering to a model the downsides of which are becoming increasingly manifest.
Author: Hallie Eakin
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 081653358X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
From floods and droughts to tsunamis and hurricanes, recent years have seen a distressing and often devastating increase in extreme climatic events. While it is possible to study these disasters from a purely scientific perspective, a growing preponderance of evidence suggests that changes in the environment are related to both a shift in global economic relations and these weather-related disasters. In Weathering Risk in Rural Mexico, Hallie Eakin draws on ethnographic data collected in three agricultural communities in rural Mexico to show how economic and climatic change not only are linked in cause and effect at the planetary scale but also interact in unpredictable and complex ways in the context of regional political and trade relationships, national economic and social programs, and the decision-making of institutions, enterprises, and individuals. She shows how the parallel processes of globalization and climatic change result in populations that are “doubly exposed” and thus particularly vulnerable. Chapters trace the effects of El Niño in central Mexico in the late 1990s alongside some of the principal changes in the country’s agricultural policy. Eakin argues that in order to develop policies that effectively address rural poverty and agricultural development, we need an improved understanding of how households cope simultaneously with various sources of uncertainty and adjust their livelihoods to accommodate evolving environmental, political, and economic realities.
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Mexico
Languages : en
Pages : 126
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Author: Gabriela Soto Laveaga
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822391961
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 347
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Book Description
In the 1940s chemists discovered that barbasco, a wild yam indigenous to Mexico, could be used to mass-produce synthetic steroid hormones. Barbasco spurred the development of new drugs, including cortisone and the first viable oral contraceptives, and positioned Mexico as a major player in the global pharmaceutical industry. Yet few people today are aware of Mexico’s role in achieving these advances in modern medicine. In Jungle Laboratories, Gabriela Soto Laveaga reconstructs the story of how rural yam pickers, international pharmaceutical companies, and the Mexican state collaborated and collided over the barbasco. By so doing, she sheds important light on a crucial period in Mexican history and challenges us to reconsider who can produce science. Soto Laveaga traces the political, economic, and scientific development of the global barbasco industry from its emergence in the 1940s, through its appropriation by a populist Mexican state in 1970, to its obsolescence in the mid-1990s. She focuses primarily on the rural southern region of Tuxtepec, Oaxaca, where the yam grew most freely and where scientists relied on local, indigenous knowledge to cultivate and harvest the plant. Rural Mexicans, at first unaware of the pharmaceutical and financial value of barbasco, later acquired and deployed scientific knowledge to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies, lobby the Mexican government, and ultimately transform how urban Mexicans perceived them. By illuminating how the yam made its way from the jungles of Mexico, to domestic and foreign scientific laboratories where it was transformed into pills, to the medicine cabinets of millions of women across the globe, Jungle Laboratories urges us to recognize the ways that Mexican peasants attained social and political legitimacy in the twentieth century, and positions Latin America as a major producer of scientific knowledge.
Author: Houchang E. Chehabi
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801856945
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 302
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Book Description
Authoritarian governments are often based on raw power sustained by fear of punishment and hope of reward. This text identifies common characteristics of such regimes, comparing them to totalitarian and authoritarian forms of government, and tracing common patterns for their genesis and demise.
Author: Paul Lawrence Haber
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271045531
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 298
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Book Description
When Vicente Fox was elected Mexico&’s president in 2000, the world&’s most enduring twentieth-century authoritarian regime finally came to an end. In this book Paul Haber explains how urban popular movements contributed to such a historic transition. In the 1960s Mexico&’s urban poor, effectively incorporated into institutionalized forms of clientelism and cooptation, were perceived as passive and acquiescent. Their situation changed during the 1970s, Haber shows, as popular movements&—led largely by young people inspired by the revolutionary ideals of Mexico&’s 1960s student movement&—took the first steps toward mobilizing the urban poor in what would develop into the full-scale political protests of the 1980s. When Mexico&’s economic crisis came in the early 1980s, urban popular movements were in a position to play a major role in the growing democratic opposition. Haber, using a creative blend of ethnography and policy analysis, traces this history on a national level and with detailed reference to two key organizations, the Comit&é de Defensa Popular of Durango and the Asamblea de Barrios of Mexico City. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, many of Mexico&’s most important social leaders saw new opportunities in electoral politics, and the transformation from social movement to party politics began. Haber&’s study closely follows the urban dimensions of this history and spells out its implications not only for the urban poor but also for Mexico&’s nascent democracy.
Author: Richard Snyder
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521790345
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 286
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Book Description
Richard Snyder's study offers an analysis of politics after neoliberalism.
Author: Brian Palmer-Rubin
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472902873
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 343
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Book Description
Why have Latin American democracies proven unable to confront the structural inequalities that cripple their economies and stymie social mobility? Brian Palmer-Rubin contends that we may lay the blame on these countries’ systems of interest representation, which exhibit “biased pluralism,” a system in which the demands of organizations representing economic elites—especially large corporations—predominate. A more inclusive model of representation would not only require a more encompassing and empowered set of institutions to represent workers, but would also feature spaces for non-eliteproducers—such as farmers and small-business owners to have a say in sectoral economic policies. With analysis drawing on over 100 interviews, an original survey, and official government data, this book focuses on such organizations and develops an account of biased pluralism in developing countries typified by the centrality of patronage—discretionarily allocated state benefits. Rather than serving as conduits for demand-making about development models, political parties and interest organizations often broker state subsidies or social programs, augmenting the short-term income of beneficiaries, but doing little to improve their long-term economic prospects. When organizations become diverted into patronage politics, the economic demands of the masses go unheard in the policies that most affect their lives, and along the way, their economic interests go unrepresented.
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Latin America
Languages : en
Pages : 736
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