EDUCATION AND NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN MEXICO.

By Charles NashMyers '61. Princeton, N. J.: PrincetonUniversity (Industrial Relations Section).1965. 148 pp. $3.75.

In this ticklish business of modernization going on all over the less-developed world, sharp differences among regions in a given country is the rule rather than the exception. Regional economic disparities characterize Venezuela, Guatemala, Peru, Liberia, Ghana, Nigeria, and India, among others. In this book Mr. Myers points up this same pattern of economic imbalance in Mexico's growth, and graphically correlates it with closely similar imbalances in the country's educational progress: “... the development of human resources has been both a requisite and a result of Mexico's economic development ... both soil and harvest of the modernization." The Federal District and the northern border states had at the same time both higher growth rates and greater concentration of educational resources. "Higher education, in particular, has largely served the needs and expectations of the advanced regions, though not always ... consciously or efficiently." Though this imbalance, part deliberate and part circumstance, has well nurtured Mexico to now, the author warns that diseconomies of scale in education and industry will likely begin to emerge in the leading regions, particularly the Federal District.

Unfortunately, though, the investment needed to mount a comprehensive program in the poorer regions will be very large, and the process that favored the advanced regions may be a difficult one to reverse. The author concludes, "The Mexican case poses the dilemma that most developing nations must face ... the hard choice between rapid elimination of ignorance and poverty in the backward regions and rapid growth nationally. ... It is the paradoxical lesson of the Mexican experience that the path to greater regional equality may lead at first to the encouragement of greater inequalities."

Professor of Business Administration at theTuck School, Mr. Broehl, author of anumber of books in the field of business history and economic development, teaches acourse, Business and Society, tracing theevolution of American business and itsresponsibilities.