Six years after Hurricane Harvey deluged the Texas Gulf Coast, how exposed are Houston and Harris County to flooding risk? Jim Blackburn and Jennifer Borski examine key challenges and changes needed going forward.
This report explores the motives underlying Mexico’s contradictory climate change policies. Given the fossil fuel-centered actions of the López Obrador administration, the author argues that Mexico’s recent clean energy turn is merely an attempt to lower tensions with the U.S. — not a true commitment to combatting climate change.
Nonresident scholar Richard Kilroy explores how Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s decision to move the Guardia Nacional — an institution created to protect public safety — under the control of Mexico’s military could have dire consequences for civil-military relations and U.S.-Mexico security relations.
Truth-in-taxation measures, which are intended to serve taxpayers, have failed to constrain the property tax burden in Texas, write Jennifer Rabb and Lebena Varghese of the McNair Center for Entrepreneurship and Economic Growth. They argue that it is incumbent upon the government to make tax rate notices clear, relevant and above all truthful.
This paper reviews the attempts of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to push for reforms in the electricity sector that would strengthen the Comisión Federal de Electricidad, Mexico’s state-owned electric utility, while limiting the involvement of privately owned power companies.
With Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador pushing for the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) to replace the Organization of American States (OAS), which the U.S. currently dominates, the future of security relations in the Western Hemisphere is in question. This paper assesses four possible future scenarios and offers policy recommendations for a reimagined OAS.
Mexico's complex land governance regime does not generate certainty for foreign investors, writes nonresident scholar Miriam Grunstein. In this paper, she explores land classifications in Mexico and the challenges investors may face when attempting to acquire acreage.
This paper analyzes the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats facing Mexico's new National Guard amid ongoing public health and safety crises and growing nationalism in Mexico and the United States.
The authors look at the key drivers impacting national security and defense relations between the United States and Mexico and offer four possible scenarios for the future, along with policy recommendations to support the avoidance of conflict.
