This competently edited book covers a range of mainly policy issues currently facing Mexico. Like many Brookings publications, it concentrates to a significant extent on questions involving the United States; there are four chapters out of nine that cover broadly international issues. Unfortunately, this topic selection has done nothing to make the work especially interesting. There are a whole series of topics whose inclusion might have added more to the volume than any one of the four discussions of US–Mexican relations. Those that might have been considered include the governance of Mexico City and its importance for the Left in Mexico.
This reviewer also would have liked more discussion of the reasons for the survival and recovery of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI). After all, many observers predicted the PRI's demise following its defeat in successive presidential elections. Another absent discussion has to do with change in higher education. This can be understood as an aspect of globalisation, and it has changed the whole character of public life in Mexico. Moving from politics to policy, also missing was any discussion of the role of agriculture or its connection with indigenous Mexico and the latter's poverty and slow economic growth. Moving from policy to culture, there is also an absence of discussion of issues to do with the role of Catholicism and the Church. The fact that abortion is now legal in Mexico City and that it may soon be followed by the legalisation of drugs tells us a lot about how Mexico is changing.
These issues interact. For example, for as long as the Left governs Mexico City, it will have possibilities for winning the presidency. Fear of this outcome has driven the PRI and the Partido Acción Nacional (National Action Party, PAN) closer together, and this has in turn facilitated Peña Nieto's ability to carry through an ambitious reform programme of market economics and institutional change. Peña Nieto's reforms, for better or worse, are likely to prove decisive in the next set of presidential elections.
What the book does cover, however, is covered capably. A chapter by Arturo Franco that seeks to explain why Mexico has grown so slowly over the past generation is uncharacteristically interesting. Mexico, after all, is one of the poster children of economic orthodoxy in Latin America, but the consequences of such policies in terms of living standards have been disappointing. Franco's other chapter, which deals with political questions, was written at an unfortunate time because the author did not have the opportunity to do more than touch on the dramatic reform programme under the Peña Nieto presidency. The question today is not whether radical reform can take place but rather what its consequences will be.
Much the same observation could be made about Chacón's chapter on Mexican public education, although it does bring up some general points about some of the issues that public education raises. Similarly, Duncan Wood's chapter on energy policy is factually interesting but again came to press before the most recent energy reform was enacted.
Obviously one cannot prevent discussions of policy from eventually becoming obsolete, but one nevertheless has the impression that this work has tended to fall between two stools. A richer historical account focused on issues of long-term continuity and change might have enhanced the volume's relevance more than a discussion of short-term policy. However, the discussion that we do get, while contemporary enough, is only sporadically interesting, and one fears that it will soon be overtaken by events.
