Mexico's Economic Dilemma The Developmental Failure of Neoliberalism

""This is surely the best treatment of modern Mexican economic history and the development of an unending crisis. Mexico's close linking to the United States through NAFTA produced an acute vulnerability to the Great Crisis, and this Mexico's current condition ought to be an acute embarrassment to the architects of neoliberal globalization."-James K. Galbraith, University of Texas at Austin ; author of The Predator Sate: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and why Liberals Should Too" ""In the early 1980's Mexico, as did many countries around the world, adopted the economic policies and institutions propounded by the Milton Friedman school of neoliberalism. Twenty-five years later, the results have been extremely disappointing, and Mexico is in the midst of a deep socioeconomic crisis. In order to understand what has happened, an alternative political economy approach is needed, because, as Albert Schweitzer once noted: 'theory determines what we look for.'" ""James Cypher and Raul Delgado Wise provide just that: a political economy approach that is based not on individualistic rational economic behavior assumptions but on a wide-ranging, historically based socioeconomic and political analysis. The authors place the Mexican case in the context of its quite successful earlier development period, of its decline and demise, of the accelerating globalization of capitalism and in particular of the close integration of Mexico with the United States. They analyze in depth the critical role of the maquila and 'diguised' maquila sectors, and in a most interesting and original contribution, the effects of migration both in Mexico and the United States."