economics at San Diego State University, where he also served as director of the Latin American Studies program. He is the author of A Great Deal of Ruin: Financial Crises Since 1929 and the textbook International Economics, now in its eighth edition.
Gerber applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Border Economies: Cities Bridging the U.S.-Mexico Divide, and reported the following:
Page 99 throws the reader into the middle of the discussion in Mexico in the 1960s about the reasons for a special manufacturing zone that eventually became a concentrated region of manufacturing on the border known as the maquiladora industry. The debate in Mexico centered around the need to create jobs for workers at the border, many of whom had been migrant workers under the U.S. guest worker program, known as the bracero program, that was terminated by the United States on January 1, 1965. The core idea of the book is that Mexican and U.S. border communities are highly interactive, each responding to conditions that originate on the opposite side of the border. The discussion on page 99 is but one of the many cases where Mexican policy makers and leaders found it in their interest to consider how best to respond to changes that were happening on the U.S. side. Throughout the book, those kinds of considerations are matched by mirror-image cases where U.S. interests responded to changes in Mexico. So, while the discussion on page 99 does not expose the reader to the breadth or depth of the book, it does reflect a theme that runs through the entire work.Learn more about Border Economies at the University of Arizona Press website.
--Marshal Zeringue
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