Environmental Capacity in Mexico: An Assessment

Though a developing country, Mexico is well placed by many aggregate development measures. It is the second largest economy in Latin America; with a GNP per capita in 1995 dollars of $ 3,320 it is solidly ensconced among the world’s upper-middle income countries, one of only six of thirty-six Latin American countries so ranked (World Bank, 1997: 214–215). Economic progress, however, has come at a high price in environmental degradation, a cost that it has begun to reckon only in the last decade.