Mexico Research Paper

2807 Words6 Pages

Mexico has experienced many reforms economically, socially, and politically in recent history leading itself into becoming a more well developed country. Typically, when people think of Mexico they think of the corruption in the government, the violent drug cartels, the widespread poverty, and the long time one party dominance of the government. Although these are major problems, they are not problems that are impossible to fix, or are currently being fixed. They are not persistent all throughout Mexico either, there are places where poverty, violent drug cartels, and corruption is non existent. Mexico is often misunderstood and generalized for a few flaws and characteristics it possesses. By the previously accepted definition, Mexico is a third world country. But by today's terms countries are either developing or developed, and Mexico is often seen as a developing country despite it containing many qualities that would lead it to being a developed country.
Looking back at major events in Mexican history there are obvious deficiencies within the thought process of the government. Starting with the oil discovery in 1970 there are instances of poor decision making. When Mexico had first started to take advantage of their oil discovery it was all positive. Mexico became an exporter of oil instead of an importer, which caused a temporary recovery from debt, and caused the economy to grow from the increased exports and halted imports on oil; although in the long run the oil discoveries showed to be more detrimental than anything else. The peso became over-valued, which then caused non-oil exports throughout the 1970s to cripple. The peso continued to rise in value until in 1980 when it crashed causing the second peso dev...

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...nts and change, it creates a very stale country. With legitimate elections and politicians it creates competition, competition only does good because of how it sifts out the bad and forces improvement with the good. This applies to government officials perfectly, if they just sit in office and don't make any changes they won't be reelected into office when elections are held again. Even without fixing the corruption though, Mexico is transitioning to being a more developed with improvements like ending the PRI reign, signing NAFTA, the auto manufacturing boom, and some smaller reforms like the subsidies for the poor. Mexico possesses many characteristics that would lead people to believe it is a developing country, but Mexico has made tremendous improvements in their society and infrastructure that arguably make them more of a developed country than anything.

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