Patricio Aroca – författare

This book explores the spatial and contextual factors behind citizens'' anger, frustration, and sense of abandonment, alongside the role of digital platforms in politically marginalized areas. It shifts the focus from voting geography to the geography of discontent, offering a new perspective on digital inequalities. The study addresses the complexities of "left-behind" places, recognizing that patterns of decline in developed countries differ from those in developing nations, where political and cultural dynamics play a key role.

Using Chile’s Valparaíso region as a case study, the book applies its framework to a context characterized by a strong party system, robust institutions, and high Internet penetration. Chile’s recent political crisis, marked by widespread dissatisfaction, makes this analysis particularly relevant. Valparaíso, with its unique role as the host of the National Congress and as a focal point of the 2019 social uprising, serves as a microcosm for understanding the spatial dimensions of political discontent in digitally connected societies.

In this book, the dynamics of continuity and change in the regional economic development of Mexico and the US border states are analyzed. These studies cover the last 25 years, after the first trade agreement, between a developed and a developing country, tooks place, and where international trade and investment have been combined with a set of relevant local factors such as regional innovation, industrialization patterns, multinational corporations’ modes of operation, public investment, and national content of exports.

 The book offers researchers a precise identification of stylized facts that characterize the pattern of regional development in Mexico and the US Southwest as well as state-of-the-art applications contrasting hypotheses from new economic geography, endogenous and neo-Schumpeterian economic growth models, and new international trade. To graduate and advanced undergraduate students in the fields of spatial geographic economics, this book offers an excellent source for its updated review of current topics on regional development in Mexico. To policy makers, the book helps to identify policy areas to reinforce the dynamics of regional development.

 Whereas other books have looked at the several impacts of NAFTA on national economies, productive sectors, and societies, this book analyzes the trade agreement’s impact with a long-term view across the diversity of developments of Mexico´s regions. As well, the analysis is carried out with the perspective of prospective reforms of a renovated trade agreement between the United States and the new Mexican federal administration .

 The collaborators in this book are researchers who are experts at the international and national levels in the field of regional economic development. During the last 25 years they have conducted their analyses in different regions of Mexico and the United States as university researchers, advisors to state and federal governments, and as practitioners.