Elizabeth Ferry explores how members of the Santa Fe Cooperative, a silver mine in Mexico, give meaning to their labor in an era of rampant globalization. She analyzes the cooperative's practices and the importance of patrimonio (patrimony) in their understanding of work, tradition, and...

Combining interdisciplinary research with case study analysis at scales ranging from the local to the global, Confronting the Coffee Crisis reveals the promise and the perils of efforts to create a more sustainable coffee industry.

Knowledge and its application are now widely recognized to be key sources of growth in the global economy. Putting knowledge to work allows countries to improve everyday life for their people, opening up new possibilities for small and medium-size enterprises and other less-developed economic...

As populations age and revenues diminish, government and private pension funds around the world are facing insolvency. The looming social security crisis is especially dire for women, who live longer than men but have worked less in the formal labor force. This groundbreaking study examines...

Large and growing subsidies to residential consumers in Mexico have become a major policy concern. This report explains the growth of subsidies, the current distribution of subsidies across income classes, and uses utility and household survey data to simulate how alternative subsidy mechanisms...

As countries large and small, rich and poor are drawn inexorably into the global economy, protectionist policies are proving increasingly inefficient and ineffective for driving growth. The countries of Latin America, which have long pursued agendas of state ownership and heavy regulation of key...

The credit risk measures we develop in this paper are used to investigate macrofinancial linkages in the Mexican banking system. Domestic and external macro-financial variables are found to be closely associated with banking soundness. At the aggregate level, high external volatility and...

In 1937, Mexican workers were among the strikers and supporters beaten, arrested, and murdered by Chicago policemen in the now infamous Republic Steel Mill Strike. Using this event as a springboard, Zaragosa Vargas embarks on the first full-scale history of the Mexican-American labor movement in...

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was bold and controversial from the start. When first conceived, it was far from obvious that it would be possible given the circumstances of the times. Drawing from a December 2013 Hoover Institution conference on "NAFTA at 20," this book brings...

Fossil fuels propelled industries and nations into the modern age and continue to powerfully influence economies and politics today. As Energy Capitals demonstrates, the discovery and exploitation of fossil fuels has proven to be a mixed blessing in many of the cities and regions where it has...