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The threat of transnational organized crime is a major concern in the international arena. This article, based on qualitative interviews with 133 migrant smugglers operating in the border between Mexico and the United States, aims to examine if migrant smuggling networks operating in Mexico carry terrorist to the United States. This paper concludes that although half of the respondents thought that the terrorists could reach the United States using migrant smuggling networks, none had direct knowledge about the passage of terrorists through the border between Mexico and the United States. Moreover, the data collected indicate that it is unlikely that Mexican migrant smugglers could stablish alliances with terrorist groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes two questions: where does United States public administration is going and which would be the best way to build its path toward the future. The author begins discussing through a historical point of view, where it is clear that there are important intellectual confusions. These are not only due to the relatively short existence of the discipline in United States, but also in deeper cultural traditions of such country. Next, the author tries to draw the conceptual boundaries of the discipline and discusses which are its special fields, scientific techniques, methodology, and emergent categories. Last but not least, the paper proposes a particular perspective regarding the direction that the United States administrative science might take given the lack of a concept of the State (beginning with its constitutional design) which might be taken as a fact for this country, continuing to affecting the United States perspective on public administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the 1990’s the United States adopted a border enforcement strategy to discourage illegal immigrants from attempting to enter the country. However, tougher enforcement did not prevent migrant crossings. This paper, based on a qualitative methodology that includes in depth interviews with eighty migrant smugglers, examines the causes of corruption of U.S. immigration officials and concludes that corruption is a key element in migrant smuggling because it makes it easier to get the migrants across the borders. The complicity of border and immigration officials with smugglers and employers explains why today’s probability of apprehension is lower than half a century ago. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the Mexican automobile and truck industries, and estimates the long run functional relationship between these industries and the automobile industry in the USA. The methodology consists of a cointegration analysis of the two series in the long run and the estimation of an autoregressive vector to evaluate the response of the Mexican automobile industry to shocks coming from the US automobile industry. The results show a longrun positive functional relationship between the US car industry and the Mexican car and truck industries, and also a shortterm positive shock with four periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are some scholars who believe that Mexican political science has followed the standard of American political science and the former has accumulated the same flaws of the later, whereas other scholars consider that the practice of the discipline is still far from the American standard but that should be its goal. The current discussion is dominated by personal impressions rather than by empirical evaluations on the actual state of the discipline. This paper analyzes a sample of 231 published articles in three leading political science journals between 1990 and 2007. Contrary to beliefs about the Americanization of Mexican political science, results show that the later is dominantly descriptive, monographic and qualitative. The main conclusion is that beyond debating the preeminence of any method in particular, the discipline in Mexico will contribute more to the extent that it starts debating substantive aspects of the research methods and processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper estimates the impact of per capita income levels of Mexican border cities on labor employment of the US border city pairs. During the 90's, the northern border cities of Mexico experienced rapid growth in their population and in their manufacturing and services sectors. A generalized least squares econometric model was constructed in order to estimate the impact of the Mexican cities per capita income on the employment of services and manufacturing sectors of the US border cities. The results showed that the coefficients of the variables of income and border crossings positively affected the employment of the manufacturing and services sectors of the US border cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the absolute version of the purchasing power parity hypothesis is bested as a long-run equilibrium condition in the Mexican case, in particular the existence of convergence between the prices of Mexico and the prices of United States, valuated in the same currency is evaluated. The existence of unit roots in different measures of the real exchange rate and the cointegration of various kinds of internal and external prices valued in the same currency, are tested by using several methodologies. The results show weak evidence in favor of the purchasing power parity which would be a consequence of the action of structural and transitory economic factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyzes the relationship between the Mexican peso/USD exchange rate and the net positions of speculators in the peso futures market at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange within the microstructure approach to exchange rate determination. For the period January 5th, 1999-November 1st, 2005, it is shown that the relationship has not been constant due to the fast growth in the peso futures market. This implies that any effort to forecast the peso/USD exchange rate exploiting this relationship must consider this fact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]