An exploration of the interrelated trends of Mexico's transitional politics and society. Offering perspectives on the problems on the Mexican agenda, the authors discuss the politics of change, the challenges of social development, and how to build a mutually beneficial US-Mexico relationship.

This is the first book to fully review the Mexican health system, its organization and governance, health financing, health care provision, health reforms, and health system performance. The book is based on the most recent data and focuses on the three main components that constitute Mexico’s health system: 1) employment-based social insurance programs, 2) public assistance services for the uninsured, and 3) a private sector composed of service providers, insurers, and pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers and distributors.

Initiated in the mid-1970s, Mexico's program of political reform was designed to provide a new opportunity for political competition. In this book, contributors examine the significance political mobilization has had and the extent to which the reform has served as a vehicle for defusing discontent in the wake of Mexico's failed oil-based development program and the related financial collapse. Specifically, they analyze the Institutional Revolutionary Party's (PRI) performance within the more fluid political context, the development of expanded organized political opposition, the renewal of activity by the National Action Party (PAN), and the response of the Mexican citizenry. The book provides the only detailed empirical analysis of the outcomes of reform initiatives currently available and makes a valuable contribution to the theoretical literature on the process of political "democratization" within authoritarian systems. The case of Mexico is particularly interesting from a theoretical perspective, given the earlier absence of a fully functioning multiparty system in the postrevolutionary period, the development of wholly new instruments for the representation of opposing interests, and the transformation of the roles of established organizations.

Mexico in Transition provides a wide-ranging, empirical and up-to-date survey of the multiple impacts neoliberal policies have had in practice in Mexico over twenty years, and the specific impacts of the NAFTA Agreement. The volume covers a wide terrain, including the effects of globalization on peasants; the impact of neoliberalism on wages, trade unions, and specifically women workers; the emergence of new social movements El Barzón and the Zapatistas (EZLN); how the environment, especially biodiversity, has become a target for colonization by transnational corporations; the political issue of migration to the United States; and the complicated intersections of economic and political liberalization. Mexico in Transition provides rich concrete evidence of what happens to the different sectors of an economy, its people, and natural resources, as the profound change of direction that neoliberal policy represents takes hold. It also describes and explains the diverse forms of resistance and challenge that different civil-society groups of those affected are now offering to a model the downsides of which are becoming increasingly manifest.

This book is a collection of essays on the Mexican transition to democracy that offers reflections on different aspects of civic culture, the political process, electoral struggles, and critical junctures. They were written at different points in time and even though they have been corrected and adapted, they have kept the tension and fervour with which they were originally created. They provide the reader with a vision of what goes on behind those horrifying images that depict Mexico as a country plagued by narcotrafficking groups and subjected to unbridled homicidal violence. These images hide the complex political reality of the country and the accidents and shocks democracy has suffered.

This book presents an evolutionary biogeographic analysis of the Mexican Transition Zone, which is situated in the overlap of the Nearctic and Neotropical regions. It includes a comprehensive review of previous track, cladistic and molecular biogeographic analyses and is illustrated with full color maps and vegetation photographs of the respective areas covered. Given its scope, the book will be of interest to students and researchers whose work involves systematic and biogeographic analyses of plant and animal taxa of the Mexican Transition Zone or other transition zones of the world, and to ecologists working in biodiversity conservation, who will be able to appreciate the evolutionary relevance of the Mexican Transition Zone for establishing conservation areas..