Mexico under NAFTA: a critical assessment

This paper assesses the evolution and performance of several key economic and social variables in Mexico following the passage of NAFTA. The evidence shows that under NAFTA Mexican trade and foreign direct investment inflows have risen at rapid rates, particularly in the export-oriented assembly-line sector. However, the evidence also suggests that it is hard to disentangle the effects of NAFTA from the other non-NAFTA factors such as demand in the U.S. in explaining the dynamism of the Mexican export sector (and economy). This has been attested by how the Mexican economy has been dragged into a severe recession over the past two years as a result of the relatively mild downturn in the U.S. business cycle.Insofar as employment growth, real wages in manufacturing, and productivity performance is concerned, the evidence presented indicates that the record has been lackluster at best and disastrous at worst. Manufacturing employment fell dramatically after the peso crisis, and remains stagnant. Real wages have plunged since the peso crisis and have yet to recover levels attained in the mid-1980s. In terms of productivity performance, no strong conclusions can be reached given the conflicting estimates in the extant literature. At best, the data show that productivity rose at healthy rates in the tradeable sector, but stagnated in the non-tradeable sector.Finally, the paper presents evidence which shows that both the functional and size distribution of income have become more skewed during the period of trade and investment liberalization (JEL 040,054).     

Environment, trade, and strategic interdependence: A simple model with implications for NAFTA

Trade under oligopolistic industry structure is analyzed when the industries pollute the environment and when tax is used to regulate pollution. When trade occurs among neighboring countries, as is the case with NAFTA, the effectiveness of regulation depends on whether pollutants are global (i.e. cross borders) or are locally confined to each country. Not only do industries act strategically, but so do the regulators in each country act strategically vis-a-vis one another. A number of important and interesting results are derived.     

Racialization and Rescaling: Post‐Katrina Rebuilding and the Louisiana Road Home Program

This article examines the interlocking nature of racialization and rescaling in post‐Katrina New Orleans, focusing specifically on the implementation of the Louisiana Road Home program, the largest housing recovery program in US history. Based on interviews and long‐term ethnographic fieldwork, I conceptualize the Road Home program as a racialized spatial strategy to revalorize disaster‐devastated spaces and enhance the exchangeability of damaged property. I trace the logic of rescaling in post‐Katrina New Orleans and reveal the ways in which state policies to accelerate the turnover time of flood‐damaged housing reflect and reinforce the racialization of space. New Orleans stands as a valuable laboratory for the study of government intervention under conditions of widespread upscaling, downscaling and outscaling processes, pushing trends found elsewhere to their limits while revealing the negative consequences of rescaling for local institutions and residents. The article illustrates the localized dynamics of rescaling in times of crisis and offers a novel processual account of the drivers and consequences of rescaling processes in a disaster‐impacted territory.     

尺度重构视角下国家级新区“多规合一”的特征与实现途径

以尺度重构为视角,基于国家级新区成立、发展的逻辑演变,探讨"多规合一"的空间规划对于新区发展的作用机理和规划路径选择。研究认为,国家级新区是国家战略性选择的"增量空间",作为国家治理和国土空间优化的载体,为"多规合一"实践探索提供了适宜平台。"多规合一"的规划编制也将对新区的治理模式重构、空间战略引导和综合实施等方面发挥重要作用。最后,文章从协调原则、组织机制、编制模式和实施平台等方面提出了建议。     

论改制过程中后期国有资产流失的财务监管机制

一、我国国有资产流失的现状国有资产流失主要指运用各种手段将国有产权、国有资产权益以及由此而产生出的国有收益转化成非国有产权、非国有资产权益和非国有收益,或者以国有资产毁损、消失等形式导致的流失。本文主要从企业改制过程中和改制后两个阶段来分析。     

Global monetary instability: The role of the IMF,the EU and NAFTA

This paper argues that the global monetary system has exhibited significant instability since the collapse of the Bretton Woods regime in 1971. The current challenge for economists and policy makers is the creation of a global monetary system that offers greater exchange rate stability without sacrificing international capital mobility. This paper proposes a solution that consists of three components. First, strengthening the international financial architecture to bring stability, primarily to emerging nations. Second, eventually creating a monetary union in NAFTA and extending it to other countries of the Western Hemisphere to bring stability to this region à la the European Monetary Union (EMU). Third, coordinating economic policies among the U.S., EU and Japan to stabilize these three key global currencies.     

NAFTA and North American stock market linkages: an empirical note

This paper provides tests of the co-movement of the North American stock markets. We find over the post-US stock market crash period, 1987:11 through 1997:03, there is no cointegration present in these markets even when the passage of NAFTA is taken into account. The absence of cointegration allows us to draw several conclusions. First, the stock markets of North America are segmented. Second, the passage of NAFTA has not resulted in a greater integration of these stock markets. Finally, the data do not support the notion of a contagion effect from the 1987 U.S. stock market crash. In conclusion, the potential for long-run international diversification across the markets of North America still exists.     

Rescaling Social Reproduction: Childcare in Toronto/Canada and Stockholm/Sweden

The last two decades have witnessed the restructuring and rescaling of the welfare regimes consolidated in the postwar era. More is involved, however, than rollbacks justified by neoliberal globalization and engineered via downloading to subnational scales. States are also being pushed to assume new responsibilities for social reproduction as a result of the ‘care crisis’ stemming from the death of the male breadwinner/female caregiver family form. This article focuses on the interaction between national welfare regimes and subnational sites — namely two important urban nodes in Canada (Toronto) and Sweden (Stockholm) where changing gender relations began to disrupt post‐war patterns of social reproduction earlier than in the rest of their respective countries. Both cities experimented with childcare programs that posed a challenge to their respective national policy regimes. In one case, local mobilization contributed to a significant policy shift at the national scale whereas the other experiment, having failed to induce change in the national regime, found its very viability increasingly imperilled. Les deux dernières décennies ont vu la restructuration et le redimensionnement des régimes de protection sociale élaborés dans la phase d’après‐guerre. Pourtant, il ne s’agit pas seulement de réductions justifiées par une mondialisation néolibérale et opérées en se déchargeant sur les niveaux subnationaux. En effet, les Etats sont forcés d’assumer de nouvelles responsabilités à l’égard de la reproduction sociale, du fait de la ‘crise des soins’ provoquée par la disparition de la configuration familiale de l’homme‐soutien de famille et de la femme‐pourvoyeuse de soins. Cet article se consacre à l’interaction entre systèmes sociaux nationaux et sites subnationaux à savoir deux n?uds urbains, Toronto au Canada et Stockholm en Suède, où l’évolution des relations entre genres vient perturber les schémas de reproduction sociale de l’après‐guerre plus rapidement que dans le reste du pays. Ces villes ont expérimenté des programmes d’aide à l’enfance qui ont remis en cause leurs systèmes respectifs de politique publique nationale. Dans un cas, la mobilisation locale a contribuéà un important changement politique au plan national tandis que l’autre, n’ayant pas réussi à susciter d’évolution nationale, a vu sa viabilité de plus en plus menacée.     

Regional integration among the unequal: a CGE model of NAFTA and the Central American republics

This paper addresses two questions. The first is the impact of alternative regional integration accords on trade, welfare and development in the small developing countries of Central America as well as the larger rich countries of NAFTA. The second concerns differences in options facing the Central American countries and what reformed institutional mechanisms might be needed for optimal regional arrangements.     

Continuity and Change in Public Policy: Redistribution,Exclusion and State Rescaling in Turkey

This article discusses potential reasons for the continuities in the broader policy agendas of capitalist states, despite radical shifts in economic policies, by employing the state‐rescaling framework. Its main thrust is that, even though centrally designed policy programs mainly aim to give direction to the dynamics of the market economy, the institutional (re)structuring needed to operationalize such policy measures has been shaped around a politics of redistribution, a product both of the exclusionary results of past policies and the negative results of the newly introduced policy programs. This dialectical tension turns state rescaling into a political exercise in solving, and reproducing, ‘systemic crises’. The article examines the history of state rescaling in Turkey to develop these arguments.     

Fracturing Hegemony: Regionalism and State Rescaling in South Korea, 1961–71

This study is informed by the theorizing prompted by recent work on state rescaling. I aim to examine the interaction between the top‐down and bottom‐up rescaling processes that took place in the South Korean developmental state during the late 1960s and early 1970s. I focus on a regionalism that both built a regional scale and influenced the hegemonic crisis of the ruling regime. Specifically, the study illustrates the features of state space that were shaped during the developmental era and the factors that allow state space to be stable and coherent. By dealing with these questions, I provide a possible interpretation of why and how regionalism was a crucial factor in the hegemonic crisis of the 1960s and generated a rescaling of state space. What makes this study significant is not merely the fact that this space is located in East Asia. It could also, more generally, open up an alternative perspective on state rescaling during the early stages of state‐led industrialization.     

Political Rescaling and Municipal Cultural Public Policies: A Comparison of France and Québec

Do territories change public policies? This would appear to be a rather unusual research orientation. It is even a reversal of the most commonly accepted approaches to the study of territorial public action, which tend to look at this issue from the opposite perspective, that is, in examining how public policies affect territories. The municipal reforms that have simultaneously occurred in Québec and France since the late 1990s afford an excellent opportunity to consider this inversion of the issues. To do so, we take as our theme culture and municipal cultural policies. We try to define and understand to what extent there exist in Québec and France retroactive links between municipal restructuring and municipal decisions about cultural facilities and activities and, more generally, municipal cultural intervention in the urban milieu. This comparative analysis of the cases of France and Québec focuses on discourse as well as achievements. First, we look at the changes arising from institutional reforms in the supply of cultural activities, budgets devoted to culture, and cultural policies. We then consider culture as a vector in the construction of a new municipal institution and a new municipal territory.     

Soft budget constraints and strategic interactions in subnational borrowing: Evidence from the German States, 1975-2005

Cooperative federations are usually characterized by the existence of bailout guarantees and intergovernmental transfer schemes. This paper explores whether such features of cooperative federations lead to subnational soft budget constraints using panel data from the German States covering the 1975-2005 period. The methodology is based on the premise that subnational governments’ borrowing will exhibit vertical and horizontal strategic interactions if they operate under soft budget constraints. Therefore, a test for strategic interactions in subnational borrowing can be used to infer whether a cooperative federation like Germany is susceptible to soft budget constraints. The results suggest that state borrowing in Germany exhibited horizontal but not vertical interactions during the time-frame of the analysis. This indicates (i) that German States faced soft budget constraints and (ii) that they were more concerned about the likelihood of a bailout than about its volume.     

Local authority employment creation initiatives: Who gets the jobs?

Over recent years a number of British local authorities have sought to increase employment by the provision of industrial premises of various sorts. This paper investigates the number and type of jobs created and explores whether these were filled by the unemployed, by school-leavers or by previously employed workers.     

Privatizing the commons: reforming the ejido and urban development in Mexico

Few studies worldwide have analysed how to manage equitably the process whereby ‘customary’ or ‘common’ land can be incorporated into future urban development, particularly in so far as this might be achieved through privatization and deregulation. This paper focuses upon Mexico and the 1991–2 reforms of Article 27 which dramatically changed the tenure codes and political relations covering the widespread customary land sector — called ejidos. It is argued that, in effect, the reforms constitute deregulation of former tenure relations rather than outright privatization, and that rather than being radical in content, the reforms are subtle redefinitions of past practices in which the balance of administrative power over ejidal land has shifted significantly, away from the Agrarian Reform Ministry towards the Social Development Ministry and local (city) government. Deregulation appears to offer three principal scenarios for public and private sector ejido land development: Urban Development Companies, Joint Ventures and Extension to the ‘Urban Zone’, yet to date there is little evidence that any one has proven sufficiently attractive to be pursued intensively, and the paper suggests that illegal alienation of ejido land is likely to continue and may get worse. However, the latest Urban Development Program 1995–2000 identifies ejido land deregulation and urban development as one of its principal strategies, tied to President Zedillo’s New Federalism project, which seeks to strengthen municipal and state government capacity and effectiveness. This profound shift in the structure of political managerial authority and responsibility offers the increased likelihood that land regularization practices and urban planning of the now deregulated ejidos will become more significant in the future.     

Free trade and garment work: the impact of NAFTA on service and manufacturing jobs in the Los Angeles apparel industry

This article examines the impact of North American economic integration on apparel‐related employment in Los Angeles and provides a first look at consequent changes in the composite of apparel‐related occupations in the Los Angeles apparel industry. It assesses the effects of new NAFTA‐generated transnational production networks and global production strategies on apparel industry employment, including the creation of ‘new NAFTA jobs’in the greater Los Angeles area, as well as changes in hiring patterns across occupational categories. The article also explores the accessibility of NAFTA‐generated apparel jobs to displaced workers in the labor‐intensive segments of the industry. The findings suggest that the new NAFTA jobs are inaccessible to the thousands of apparel manufacturing workers displaced by the trend in offshore sourcing. Finally, the article discusses the implications and consequences of recent state‐industry partnership programs designed to train and cross‐train sewing operators for jobs that are rapidly leaving the region. Cet article examine l'impact de l'intégration économique nord‐américaine sur l'emploi dans l'habillement à Los Angeles, en procurant un premier regard sur les changements occasionnés pour la mosaïque des métiers de ce secteur d'activités dans cette ville. Il évalue les effets des nouveaux réseaux de fabrication transnationale générés par l'ALENA et des stratégies de production mondialisées sur l'emploi du secteur, y compris la création des ‘nouveaux emplois ALENA’ dans l'agglomération de Los Angeles, ainsi que les changements dans les schémas d'embauche pour les diverses catégories professionnelles. De plus, il explore l'accessibilité des emplois de l'habillement créés par l'ALENA pour les travailleurs déplacés dans les segments industriels à forte main‐d'?uvre. D'après les résultats, ces nouveaux emplois sont inaccessibles aux milliers d'ouvriers de la fabrication vestimentaire déplacés par la tendance à un approvisionnement étranger. Enfin, sont abordées les implications et conséquences des récents programmes de partenariat État‐industrie pour la formation et la formation polyvalente d'opératrices de machines à coudre à des postes qui quittent rapidement la région.     

Measuring the social impacts of local authority events: a pilot study for a civic pride scale

• The provision of events and festivals by local government has become an expected, if non‐mandatory, service. In many regions these events are organised in order to provide mainly social, rather than economic, benefits to the community and, as a consequence, the providing organisation may have difficulty in demonstrating a return on the budget invested. This paper suggests the use of multi‐item attitude scales to quantify the intangible effects of the festival or event programme on the local community. The findings of a pilot study of one such scale are presented showing that reliable and valid methods can be developed, that they can be relatively low cost and simple to apply and that the data generated can be of great value in enhancing the evaluation of local authority service provision.

Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.