In support of public policy, the law anticipates Government projects so as to pave the way for them, or is adjusted along the way in order to adapt the institutional framework to the processes which in fact prevail. A typical case is that of Mexican Agrarian legislation in the late 20th and...

This paper presents some analytical techniques to help policymakers gauge the technical and fiscal feasibility of development targets. While each of the techniques discussed below has deficiencies, taken together they have proven very useful in providing a sense of realism to target setting. The...

While Mexico's southern states differ substantially in terms of their migration profile, many of the issues confronted by the three states are the same. In this paper, we focus on five questions: (a) How large are migration flows, and what can be expected in the future?; (b) To what extent does...

This paper presents some analytical techniques to help policymakers gauge the technical and fiscal feasibility of development targets. While each of the techniques discussed below has deficiencies, taken together they have proven very useful in providing a sense of realism to target setting. The...

Unlike Mexico as a whole, the south (that is, the states of Chiapas, Guerrero, and Oaxaca) may well not reach many of the MDGs. The objective of this paper is to document this assertion and discuss some of the constraints toward reaching the MDGs, as well as some initiatives recently taken to...

Under the pressure of NAFTA negotiations Mexican government changed the agrarian legislation at the beginning of the 1990. This reform meant turning away from the former leitmotiv of social justice brought up in the revolution towards the neoliberal paradigm of economic efficiency. The old...

This article rescues and describes the trajectory of peasant production in Mexico since the eighties, and its decomposition process in the neoliberalism context. Argument is that the ‘small family farm’ tends to diversify their sources of income as a result of the fall in price of basic...

This paper attempts to answer the following questions: How poor are the southern states of Chiapas, Guerrero, and Oaxaca? How much progress was achieved in the 1990s toward reducing poverty in these states? Why are households in these states so poor? Specifically, does their poverty result from...

The strategy of the Zedillo Administration for the reduction of poverty relied on both broad-based social expenditures and targeted poverty programs. Broad-based social expenditures are devoted to the areas of social security and healthcare, education, job training, and housing. Targeted poverty...

While there are different estimates of poverty in Mexico, there is general agreement that poverty is widespread, and that the reduction of poverty should be a key area of focus for the new Administration. Beyond lack of income, poverty is a complex and multidimensional phenomena which affects...