Economic Development & Quality of Life on the Border

The Trans-Border Institute promotes attention to issues of economic development and quality of life on the U.S.-Mexican border, particularly in the greater San Diego-Tijuana region. This extended bi-national region includes much of Southern California (Escondido, National City, Chula Vista, and the Imperial Valley) and Baja California (Ensenada, Mexicali, Rosarito, and Tecate), and represents the most economically productive and dynamic metropolitan area on the U.S.-Mexican border. The San Diego Region boasts a vibrant high tech sector (biotechnology, software), telecommunications, and tourism. These industries are complemented by Baja California’s in bond assembly plants (maquiladoras), tourism, agriculture, fishing, and wineries. The integrated economies of this region bring tens of thousands of consumers, laborers, and visitors across the U.S.-Mexican border every day.

The border region’s economy in the 20 th century has been shaped in important ways by government intervention to promote infrastructure development, new industries, and policies to facilitate trade. During the 1930s and 1940s, U.S. and Mexican government initiatives brought water, power and labor to the arid and sparsely populated region. In the 1950s and 1960s, government programs helped foster economic development in key industries, including defense, manufacturing, agriculture, and the maquiladora industry created by the Mexican government’s Border Industrialization Program.

The thanks to these earlier initiatives, the border region’s economic development has since been fueled by the rise of the global economy, and especially by Mexico’s entry into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Canada and the United States in 1994. Overall, trade within the NAFTA region has more than doubled today, as Canada and Mexico have become the largest trading partners of the United States. At the same time, NAFTA brought significant challenges. Mexico experienced major currency fluctuations, relatively low GDP growth, rising informal sector employment, and significant environmental degradation. Meanwhile, the United States faced job losses, wage decline, and large trade deficits ($37 billion to Mexico and $48 billion to Canada in 2002).

Many of these trends have played out along the U.S.-Mexican border. In Baja California, maquiladoras continue to be a major source of employment and growth for Mexico. Mexico is now the primary destination for California’s exports, and has important linkages to Southern California’s diverse economies. At the same time, both sides of the border have had to grapple with major challenges due to demographic change and the environmental impacts of economic growth.

TBI helps to address the challenges of ensuring sustainable economic development in the U.S.-Mexican border region by supporting USD faculty research and activities on a variety of topics. Given the USD mission to promote service to the community, TBI supports research and activities that seek to improve the quality of life in the border region. For example, with TBI support faculty from the USD School of Business have conducted ground breaking research into the economic and social indicators that determine the quality of life in the border region. Likewise, TBI has recently worked with faculty from the Hahn School of Nursing and Health Science to organize nursing tours and outreach in Tijuana to help address the lack of health care facilities in Baja California.