Research Library

With the 2023 debt-ceiling negotiations under way, a new issue brief from John Diamond, director of the Center for Public Finance, and Autumn Engebretson looks at the effectiveness of the Budget Control Act 2011, enacted in response to the 2011 debt-ceiling crisis. Did it in fact control the budget? And could similar legislation work now?

This brief examines the legality of the decrees issued by the National Center for the Control of Energy (CENACE) and the Department of Energy (SENER) in Mexico earlier this year, which were intended to prevent renewable energy companies from connecting to the transmission grid.

This paper tracks a change in the direction of Mexico’s energy policy under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador — a change that inhibits private investment while attempting to restore Pemex’s oil monopoly.

Mexico’s 2013 energy reform, which opened its hydrocarbon and electricity industries to private investors, increased the autonomy and independence of its regulatory commissions. However, recent decisions by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador now threaten these institutions, writes nonresident scholar Miriam Grunstein.

Morocco's Justice and Development Party attempts to preserve its leading political position by presenting itself as an alternative to a system that, according to the PJD, is corrupt and morally bankrupt.

To gain public support for Mexico’s energy reforms, the government promised a future of low gas prices. The author documents the fallout when gas prices instead shot up 20 percent. 

Energy regulation under Mexico's energy-sector reforms are of great interest to investors, since autonomous regulators—protected from political pressures and able to make and sustain technical decisions—can guarantee greater legal consistency than government authorities exposed to political pressures. The difficulty was finding an alternative model that ensured the institutional strengthening of the agencies without relinquishing too much control of the executive branch.