ABS Borderlands Groups.io

The ABS Borderlands Groups.io platform is a communication platform that distributes messages to subscribers on an electronic mailing list. This group has replaced the old listserv, so if you want to stay connected with the ABS, join now!

The ABS Borderlands group is a great way to announce academic events, publications, fellowships, scholarships, etc. It is also a great way to solicit the advice of your peers, benefit from their experience, and participate in an ongoing conversation on topics relevant to border studies.

https://absborderlands.org/resources/

ABS Secretariat Jennifer Bettis is always available if you have questions.



Gülsel Çiftci 

Gülsel Çiftci, ABS Board member, recently completed a Short-Term Scientific Mission (STSM) within COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) Action CA24125 (CRICULT), hosted by the University of Dubrovnik, Croatia (22–31 May 2026).

The mission focused on climate-related risks to cultural heritage in border and coastal regions, using a comparative perspective between the Edirne-Thrace tri-border area and the Adriatic heritage landscape. Activities included a review of governance and legal frameworks, field visits to Dubrovnik’s World Heritage sites, and consultations with local researchers.

The STSM contributed to the development of a comparative analytical framework addressing heritage governance across institutional, legal, and climate adaptation dimensions. Preliminary findings highlight structural fragmentation and limited cross-border coordination as key governance challenges in both contexts.

Another update: As part of the Erasmus+ Staff Mobility Programme, Gulsel had the opportunity to visit the Centre for Tourism at the School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg, upon the invitation of Dr. Erik Lundberg, Head of Centre for Tourism and Associate Professor in the Department of Business Administration.

During her visit, she delivered a seminar entitled “Cross-Border Tourism Dynamics in the Edirne Tri-Border Region.” The seminar focused on tourism flows, visitor behavior, and the role of borders in shaping tourism experiences in the tri-border region of Türkiye, Bulgaria, and Greece.

In addition to presenting findings from her ongoing research, she introduced the work of the Association for Borderlands Studies (ABS) and discussed the growing importance of border studies in understanding contemporary tourism phenomena. The seminar highlighted how interdisciplinary perspectives from border studies can contribute to a deeper understanding of cross-border tourism, regional cooperation, and destination development.



The Talking Borders digital exhibition

The Talking Borders digital exhibition emerged from an advanced Master’s seminar in Public History, jointly taught by Machteld Venken and Klaus Behnam Shad at the University of Luxembourg during the Winter Term of 2025. The digital exhibition is prepared on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Association for Borderlands Studies.

More about the exhibition.

UniGR-Center for Border Studies

Francisco Lara-Valencia was a UniGR-CBS Fellow at LEPUR (University of Liège) in November–December 2025, where he examined the Greater Region as a cross-border socio-spatial and governance context. In an interview, he reflects on his analytical approach, methodological perspectives, and the relevance of his work for understanding cross-border dynamics in the Greater Region.

Follow here for more.

ON AIR – The Podcast Series of the UniGR-Center for Border Studies

The podcast series of the UniGR-Center for Border Studies features border research from UniGR-CBS members and international guest researchers in English, French and German. Listen to the newest episodes.

Listen here.

Samuel Okunade

Samuel Okunade is set to become the Head of Department of the newly formed Border and Migration Studies department at Lagos State University in Nigeria. This is the first university in Africa to have a Department in Border and Migration Studies, which means that Samuel is pioneering its kick-off.

As you would expect, this is a huge assignment, which Samuel is eager to begin. He is asking the ABS community for any support they may be able to provide. Samuel is open to any form of assistance that members of the ABS are willing to provide.

Most importantly:

• in equipping the library with books and journal publications
• potentially computers/ laptops to facilitate the teaching and learning process.

Please contact Samuel at samuel_okunade@yahoo.com



Border Policy Research Institute

The BPRI and Borders in Globalization (UVic) Cross-Border Research Fellow Jamie Ferrill has released her research report, "Connected Waters, Connected Threats: Border Governance and Environmental Security in the Columbia River Basin." The report assesses whether existing transboundary environmental governance arrangements are fit to manage pollution as a network‑based threat within a shared borderland system.

Read the report here.

The Cross Border Research Fellowship is co-hosted by the Border Policy Research Institute at Western Washington University and the Borders in Globalization SSHRC Research Program at the Centre for Global Studies at the University of Victoria. This joint appointment between two universities with established border studies programs offers a unique opportunity to conduct cross-border, policy-relevant research in the Cascadia border region.

Natalia Kovalchuk

Affiliation: Doctor of Philosophical Sciences, Professor, and Independent Researcher from Ukraine, currently based in Warsaw, Poland.

Natalia participated in the UniGR–Center for Border Studies seminar “Relational Borders and (Cross-)Border Relations” (Saarland University, June 25–26, 2026). Natalia presentation called, " The Evolution of the Archetype of Freedom in the Border Civilizations of Ukraine, the United States, and Poland: A Comparative Analysis" examined how the archetype of freedom emerges and transforms within the borderland civilizations of Ukraine, the United States, and Poland. She analyzes how frontier conditions shape moral, symbolic, and cultural models of freedom, with particular attention to Ukraine’s wartime experience. She utilized Archetype methodology, borderland studies, comparative civilizational analysis, and cultural-historical attribution to conduct her research.

B-Shapes

Borders Shaping Perceptions of European Societies (B-SHAPES) is a Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Action project analyzing and assessing how borders still are a key factor in how we understand societies.

Birte Wassenberg and Pierrick Bruyas guest edited a special section of BIG_Review, "Narrating Europe from the Borders: A Media Analysis of European Integration" with four critical research articles and a substantive introduction.

Follow here to read more.

The B-Shapes group has recently concluded a Horizon project on borders and borderlands, coordinated by Martin Klatt. They have a number of publications already available, but please follow along their website for future announcements. Learn more about B-Shapes.

Fatherhood in the Borderlands: A Daughter's Slow Approach - Domino R. Perez

Winner - ABS Best Book Award 2026

A contemplative exploration of cultural representations of Mexican American fathers in contemporary media.

As a young girl growing up in Houston, Texas, in the 1980s, Domino Perez spent her free time either devouring books or watching films—and thinking, always thinking, about the media she consumed. The meaningful connections between these media and how we learn form the basis of Perez's “slow" research approach to race, class, and gender in the borderlands. Part cultural history, part literary criticism, part memoir, Fatherhood in the Borderlands takes an incisive look at the value of creative inquiry while it examines the nuanced portrayal of Mexican American fathers in literature and film.

Perez reveals a shifting tension in the literal and figurative borderlands of popular narratives and shows how form, genre, and subject work to determine the roles Mexican American fathers are allowed to occupy. She also calls our attention to the cultural landscape that has allowed such a racialized representation of Mexican American fathers to continue, unopposed, for so many years. Fatherhood in the Borderlands brings readers right to the intersection of the white cultural mainstream in the United States and Mexican American cultural productions, carefully considering the legibility and illegibility of Brown fathers in contemporary media.

Read more here

Routledge Handbook of African Borderlands

The Routledge Handbook of African Borderlands provides a comprehensive analysis of the factors shaping the past, present, and future of African borderlands, in all their complexity. Co-edited by Dr. Olivier Walther, Dr. Inocent Moyo, and Dr. Isabella Soi, its 30 chapters explore how borders are more central than ever to understanding the genesis of postcolonial African states, the source of their economic wealth, the drivers of their political conflicts, and the vitality of their solidarity networks.

The book will be available in Open Access at the end of June 2026



Written by James Gerber 

Abstract: Joan B. Anderson served as the President of ABS from 1989 to 1991 and as co-editor of JBS from 1995-2000. She was a prolific scholar of the U.S.-Mexico border and Latin American economic conditions. This paper reviews her development as a scholar, her scholarship, and her contributions to ABS and the growth of border studies.

Introduction and context

I met Joan sometime in the early 1990s. She was a tenured Professor in Economics at the University of San Diego and I was a untenured Assistant Professor at San Diego State University. At some point, probably an ABS conference, we began to discuss the possibilities for estimating a human development index for counties and municipalities on the U.S.-Mexico border. That project began our friendship and working relationship of more than 25 years. When she passed away, besides a feeling of deep loss, I felt a need to write an overview of her professional and academic work so that others might learn of her contributions to border studies.

Academic background

Joan Brownell Anderson was born in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on October 15, 1938. When she was four years old, her family moved to San Diego, where she would go to school, raise her family, and make a career teaching and writing about economics, Latin America, and the US-Mexico border. After she received a BA from San Diego State University (SDSU) in 1960, she earned a MA in Economics from Stanford University in 1961. Upon returning to San Diego, she found a job lecturing (1961-64) in the Economics Department at SDSU. On a parallel track, the University of California opened its new campus in San Diego in 1960 and added new programs over the following years. In 1965, when its first group of economics PhD students were admitted, Joan was among the three students that initiated the program. She was also the first woman and the only student among her small cohort that persisted beyond the first year.   Joan was not deterred by the rigorous program and graduated in 1971 as the first woman to receive a Doctorate in Economics from UCSD. One of her daughters said her mother kept a magnet on the family’s refrigerator that said “Women who want to be as good as men lack ambition.” 

While she was in graduate school she published her first paper in a refereed journal.¹ The paper used descriptive statistics to analyze the changes in personal income taxes paid by different income groups in the United States between 1951-62. She and her co-author showed how personal exemptions and deductions skewed tax payments in favor of better off families over the dozen plus years they analyzed. This was her first foray into academic publishing and although it was outside the two areas where she would find her research home, the U.S.-Mexico border and Latin America, the paper was in a respected economics journal and established her work as strongly empirical. This work also related to inequality and the ways in which policies contributed to it. That was to be a subject that ran through her life’s work.   

Joan’s doctorate demonstrated considerable mathematical and economic modeling skills.² Her dissertation thesis built a theoretic-mathematical model of the U.S. economy with an emphasis on the linkages between changes in prices, wages, and the demand for goods and services. It was a Keynesian model of the type that would come under strong criticism in the 1980s and later during the Neoliberal, supply side wave in economic thought. Some years after that, during the financial crisis of 2007-2009, a newer version of Keynesian models would come back into fashion. Joan used data on the US economy to empirically estimate the model. This was an econometric exercise that required significant computer usage at a time before there were econometric software programs. Writing her dissertation between 1969 and 1971, she was working without desktop computers or the statistical software that runs on most machines today. Model estimation required a mainframe computer, a computer language such as Fortran, and punch cards for conveying the program instructions and for inputting the data.

After receiving her doctorate, she decided to stay in San Diego, largely for family reasons. She had a lifetime of connection to the region, three young children, family nearby, and her husband’s career was going well. She was able to obtain a part-time lectureship at San Diego State University (SDSU) but the job and her family obligations left no time to do research or to publish over most of the 1970s. Nevertheless, her experiences at SDSU were important because Norris Clement, a colleague in the Economics Department, introduced her to border studies. Clement was interested in the regional economy of San Diego-Tijuana and helped create a regional research group at SDSU called the California Border Area Resource Center, one of the first university research centers focused on the U.S.-Mexico border.⁴ In 1980, Joan co-authored a working paper for the Center, “The Economic Importance of the U.S. Southwest Border Region.” Her Spanish language capabilities were passably good, but not at an academic level, so when this paper and later works were translated into Spanish, others did the translation work. This paper marked the beginning of her research on the U.S.-Mexico border.⁵ She did not drop her interest in the macroeconomy but most of her efforts began to focus on empirical measurement and understanding conditions in the border economy.

Career as a professor of economics

In 1981, the same year that the edited volume in Mexico appeared, Joan was offered a tenure track job in the Economics Department at the University of San Diego. She occupied the position for the rest of her teaching career. With a more secure academic position and children quickly growing up, her research began to flourish. Her econometric skills were put to good use as she began to measure working conditions and the economic performance of Mexico’s border manufacturing plants (the maquiladora industry). Border manufacturing was set up as an export processing zone (EPZ) where imported intermediate inputs and capital equipment were admitted into the country tax free as long as they were used to produce goods for export. EPZs are a strategy used worldwide to promote manufacturing and manufactured goods exports. Mexico’s program began in 1965 and by the 1980s it was beginning to flourish with U.S., Japanese, Korean and other sources of foreign investment.

Joan published two articles on the maquiladora industry in 1983, one looking at the trade-offs between capital and labor and the other measuring the economic performance of border electronics manufacturing plants.⁶ These were followed in 1984 with an examination of the impact of the peso devaluation on the work effort of employees in maquilas in Mexicali, and a paper on female labor in electronics and garment sewing plants.⁷ Women were a majority of the workforce in the border manufacturing plants, holding 86 percent of the jobs in the electronics maquila, 85 percent in the garment sector, and similar levels in other lines of production. Researchers questioned whether this was due to greater dexterity and other physical traits, or whether employers preferred women because they were more compliant and less likely to organize. Joan specified an econometric model to test these two hypotheses and concluded that the preference for female workers had nothing to do with physical traits but was likely the result of the greater compliance that resulted from the more limited job opportunities available to women when compared to men. 

The 1980s were an active time in the border region and in Latin America. Border manufacturing was beginning to have a significant impact on Mexican exports but the Mexican economy suffered a string of financial and economic crises beginning in 1982 and lasting until 1989. During this period, the U.S-Mexico border began attracting more scholarly attention. The move towards a greater emphasis on border topics was also encouraged by the 1982 opening of El Colegio de la Frontera Norte (COLEF) in Tijuana. COLEF is funded by the national government of Mexico and is an advanced research institute with post-graduate degree programs in the social sciences and a focus on northern Mexico and the U.S.-Mexico border. COLEF would become an important source of academic work on Mexico’s maquiladora. Joan’s initial contribution was the Spanish translation of a paper she wrote with her co-author on apparel manufacturing that appeared in a COLEF collection edited by the industrial sociologist Jorge Carrillo.⁸

Sometime in the 1980s, Joan became active in both the ABS and the Business Association for Latin American Studies (BALAS). Her commitment to building organizations led her to serve as the Secretary of ABS, 1984-87, and on the executive committee of BALAS in 1984. A few years later she became the president of ABS (1989-91), followed by the presidency of BALAS (1994-95) and co-editor of JBS from 1995 to 2000 with Paul Ganster (San Diego State University) and Duncan Earle (University of Texas El Paso). In 1984, she began to publish regularly in the conference proceedings of BALAS. These working papers enabled her to explore new areas and new ideas about Latin American economies, and would later be refined into articles in refereed journals. While she became active in ABS and BALAS, she also began to attend two regional associations of Latin Americanists and to publish in their conference proceedings as well. The Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies (RMCLAS) is the oldest academic association of Latin Americanists in the United States. The Pacific Council on Latin American Studies is slightly younger but both were good places to publish new ideas in conference proceedings and both were important to her development as a Latin Americanist. Her research during the 1980s reflected these institutional affiliations and a developing interest in broader range of Latin American issues. She published articles on the informal economy in Mexico, hyperinflation in Bolivia and Argentina, Christian base communities in Latin America, the impact of currency devaluations in Latin America, and her first two articles in JBS.⁹ The JBS papers related to the reasons behind the growth of the informal sector in Mexico’s northern border region and an examination of the economic performance of electronic and apparel maquiladoras. 

The late 1980s, was the beginning of the end of the Latin American debt crisis but it continued to attract research interest from scholars and policymakers. The crisis posed a number of intractable problems for Latin American economies and policymakers found that solutions were not easy. Countries were plagued by falling real wages, large capital outflows for debt service, hyperinflation, and painful cycles of recession-recovery-recession. In 1988, she received a Fulbright research grant that allowed her to spend four months at the Central Bank of Ecuador. The outcome was an article in the journal of the central bank of Ecuador analyzing the impacts of fiscal and monetary policies on inflation and growth in Ecuador and, a few years later, a book on appropriate policies for confronting the Latin American debt crisis.¹⁰ The econometric tools she acquired in graduate school, plus her ability to develop macro-models, were fully on display in her book. She derived a set of policy recommendations for escaping the debt crisis but was careful to note that since the data and the macro-model were based on the Ecuadorean economy, the conclusions should not be blindly applied to other countries in Latin America. Nevertheless, many of her findings have been replicated by others in different contexts, and several ideas have been accepted as good policies for dealing with a debt crisis. For example, she noted the benefits of avoiding a fall in real wages, the need to renegotiate debts and to bring down public sector deficits, and the desirability of positive real interest rates, among others. 

By the 1990s she had developed a substantial portfolio of interests with publications to match. She had expanded her research towards issues of social concern such as poverty and the way that families living in the border region coped with their lack of resources.¹¹ One of the central issues in the border region that was not explicitly about poverty but that had significant weight was the role of the maquiladora production system in fostering Mexican economic growth. Did it contribute to rising incomes and social prosperity, or was it an obstacle to prosperity due to its low wages and the absence of economic linkages to the rest of the economy?  Was it a way for foreign capital to exploit Mexican labor and the environment, or was it an upward step on the ladder of comparative advantage? In February, 1990, at the annual meetings of the ABS in Tijuana, Ellwyn Stoddard organized a symposium on the role of the maquiladora. One of the participants and co-organizers was Jorge Carrillo, the editor of Frontera Norte, COLEF’s journal dedicated to northern Mexico, relations with the United States, and the border. Jorge organized a simultaneous translation and publication of the papers.¹² Joan’s paper was simple and direct. After acknowledging a lack of agreement as to the definition of economic development, she specified a set of economic goals that the maquiladora industry was expected to fulfill when it was created. These included benefits such as the provision of employment, foreign exchange, training for workers, managerial skills, new technologies, and industrial development. On balance, she concluded that “... the weight of the evidence is against much long term impact of maquiladoras on Mexican economic development.” (Anderson, 1990, 9). The main obstacles were the low wages offered as an incentive to business investment and the lack of forward and backward linkages to the rest of the economy. 

The issue of wages continued to occupy her thinking and in the mid-1990s she began to publish a series of papers, many with her colleague at USD, Denise Dimon, on the impact of trade on wages and on the labor force participation of women in the border region and elsewhere. They examined the influence of U.S.-Mexico economic integration on country wage differences and also the effects of Mexico’s wage policies on trade.¹³ A related set of papers around the same time examined other aspects of female labor. These included papers on labor force participation and migration to Mexico’s border with Texas, the growth of formal sector work, and the effects of marriage on labor force participation.¹⁴

New research

Over the years, Joan’s networks and experiences in Mexico, Ecuador and other parts of Latin America together with her interests in education gradually drew her into researching the lagging performance of Latin American schools and educational systems. This resulted in a co-edited book and several articles.¹⁵ Throughout this analysis she retained her empirical approach and applied statistical analysis where it was possible. The importance of education as one of the keys to unlocking economic development remained with her at all times, and was to play a central role in her next set of research papers and a book she co-authored. 

Economists have long known that GDP is an inadequate measure of a society’s level of material well-being, yet by virtue of its simplicity as a single number, and the fact that it is embedded in our system of national accounting, it continues to be used and cited. There have been many attempts to find a better measure, most of which have had limited success. One of the more widely used alternatives is the human development index (HDI). Created in the 1960s by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the HDI is a simple average of GDP per capita, a measure of education, and a measure of health. In the early 2000s, Joan and I explored whether it was possible to construct a comparable HDI for each of the counties (U.S.) and municipalities (Mexico) along the border. The result was a paper published in the JBS in 2004. This was followed in 2008 with the book, Fifty Years of Change on the U.S.-Mexico Border.¹⁶ The book provides an analysis of the changes from 1950 to 2000 in each of the three variables that comprise the HDI (income, education, and health), and a discussion of development challenges and successes on the border. It had been decades since Niles Hansen published one of the first economic studies of the U.S.-Mexico border (Hansen, 1981), and Fifty Years of Change sought to fill the gaps created by the changes in U.S.-Mexico relations and the border economy. One of the positive results of the book was that it showed that it was possible to do quantitative and comparative analysis with Mexican and U.S. data. Updates to the HDI were published in 2017 and 2023 in the JBS.¹⁷

Parting thoughts

Joan continued to attend ABS meetings in her 80s and she continued to travel to new places and to visit friends and family. The last time I saw her was at lunch with her husband Dave, the day before she left for a week to visit friends in La Paz, Mexico. She passed away a few weeks after returning.  This tribute cannot cover all of her contributions nor all of her writings. She had many roles in her long life, inside and outside academia, and loving relationships with her family and friends. She was a dedicated university professor and skilled economist who taught literally thousands of students and collaborated with many colleagues over her career. She promoted the ABS and the JBS because she deeply believed in the beneficial effects of crossing borders and learning new perspectives. Joan leaves us with a thriving organization that she once directed, and an increasingly respected journal that she co-edited in previous years. ABS celebrated its 50^th year and the JBS its 40^th in the same year she left us; our job is to continue her work. 

Sources cited

Anderson, J.B. (1990). Maquiladoras and border industrialization: Impact on economic development in Mexico. Journal of Borderlands Studies, 5:1, 5-9;   Spanish version: Anderson, J.B. (1990) Las maquiladoras y la industrialización fronteriza: el impacto sobre el desarrollo económico en México, Frontera Norte, 2:3, 142-46.

Hansen, N. (1981). The Border Economy: Regional Development in the Southwest. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

[1] With G. Babilot. (1967). Empirical evidence of the changing pattern of personal income taxes paid by income classes, 1951-1962, Southern Economic Journal, XXXII:4, 518-25.

[2] Anderson, J.B. (1971). An Econometric Model of Inflation, Excess Demand, and Changes in the Wage Rate (Doctoral dissertation, University of California San Diego). 

[3] SPSS was one of the fist statistical packages for social scientists that could be used on mainframe computers. It was created in 1968 and its first user manual was published in 1970.

[4] A few years later, the Center became the Institute for the Regional Studies of the Californias. 

[5] Anderson, J. B., California Border Area Resource Center., Clement, N. C., & Shellhammer, K. L. (1980). Economic importance of the U.S. southwest border region. California Border Area Resource Center, San Diego State University.; Anderson, J.B., Clement, N. and Shellhamer, K. (1981). La importancia económica de la frontera de Estados Unidos con México. In Noel Osborn, T., Ortiz Cruz, E., Poulson, B.W., and Rozo, C. (eds.) El Dilema de Dos Naciones: Relaciones Económicas entre México y Los Estados Unidos. México: Trillas. 429-449.

[6] Anderson, J.B. (1983). Factor substitution and adaptation in the 'off-shore' assembly plants of Baja California. Annals of Regional Science, 17:2: 29-44; Anderson, J.B. (1983). Efficiency and profitability in the electronic maquiladoras in Baja California. Proceedings of the North American Economic and Finance Association. 

[7] Anderson, J.B. & Frantz, R. (1984). The response of labour effort to falling real wages: The Mexican peso devaluation of February 1982. World Development, 12:7, 759-66; Anderson, J.B. (1984). Female participation and efficiency in Mexican electronic and garment assembly plants. Campo Libre, 2:1-2, 87-96. 

[8] Anderson, J.B. and Frantz, R. (1985). Production efficiency among Mexican apparel plants. Journal of Developing Areas, 19:3, 369-37. The Spanish language version appeared as Anderson, J.B. and Frantz, R. (1989). Eficiencia en la industria del vestido en Mexico. In J. Carrillo, ed., Reestructuración industrial: Maquiladoras en la frontera México-Estados Unidos. México, DF: Consejo Nacional de fomento Educativo, 341-370.

[9] Anderson, J.B. (1987). Halting hyperinflation: Bolivia and Argentina. In P.A. Sullivan (ed.), Proceedings from the 35^th Annual Meeting of the Rocky Mountain Council on Latin American Studies, 23-30; Anderson, J.B. and Colombo, J.A. (1988). Christian base communities and grassroots economic development in Latin America Journal of Behavioral Economics, 17:2, 97-112; Anderson, J.B. (1988). From Christian base community to cooperative: The case of Chorrillo, Panama. Review of Latin American Studies, 1:2, 91-101; Anderson, J.B. (1989). The impact of devaluation for Latin American countries: A theoretical approach. In D. Dimon and R.D. Echeverry Romero (eds.) La Internacionalización de los Negocios: Su Impacto sobre las Escuelas de Administración. 3-14; Anderson, J.B. (1988). Causes of growth in the informal labor sector in the Mexican northern border region, Journal of Borderlands Studies, 3:1, 1-12; Anderson, J.B. (1988). Size, efficiency and profitability: empirical evidence from Mexican electronic and apparel plants. Journal of Borderlands Studies, 3:2, 1-16.

[10] Anderson, J.B. and Gerencia de Investigaciones y Estudios Econométricos del Banco Central de Ecuador. (1990). El impacto de las políticas monetaria y fiscal sobre el crecimiento real y la inflación, Cuestiones Económicas, 15, 9-26; Anderson, J.B. (1991). Economic Policy Alternatives for the Latin American Debt Crisis. New York: Taylor and Francis. Anderson, J.B. (1997). Ecuador's economy in the post war period. In L. Randall (ed.), The Political Economy of Latin America in the Post war Period. Austin: University of Texas Press. 232-274. Anderson, J.B. (2000). Privatization, efficiency and market failure: Transforming Ecuador’s public sector. International Journal of Public Administration, 23:5-8, 579-602.       

[11] Anderson, J.B. and de la Rosa, M. (1991). Economic survival strategies of poor families on the Mexican border. Journal of Borderlands Studies, 6:1, 51-68. Published in Spanish as Joan B. Anderson, & Martín de la Rosa. (1991). Familias pobres de la frontera. Estrategias de sobrevivencia. Estudios Sobre Las Culturas Contemporáneas, 4:11, 75–96.

[12] Anderson, J.B. (1990). Maquiladoras and border industrialization: Impact on economic development in Mexico, Journal of Borderlands Studies, 5:1, 5-9; Anderson, J.B. (1990) Las maquiladoras y la industrialización fronteriza: el impacto sobre el desarrollo económico en México, Frontera Norte, 2:3, 142-46.

[13]Anderson, J.B. and Dimon, D. (1995). The impact of opening markets on Mexican male/female wage and occupational differentials, Social Science Journal, 32:4, 309-26. Anderson, J.B. and Dimon, D. (1996). The impact of Mexican wage policy on U.S.-Mexico trade. In D. Dimon, I. Gutierrez Tomlinson, and S.E.W. Nichols, eds. Competitiveness in International Business and Trade, Volume II, Laredo, TX: Texas A&M, 573-588. Anderson, J.B. (1998). Direct foreign investment, economic cycles, and Mexican wage policy. In F.J. Contractor, ed., Economic Transformation in Emerging Countries: The Role of Investment, Trade and Finance, Amsterdam: Elsevier. 71-84. Anderson, J.B. and Dimon, D. (1999). How will freer trade with Mexico affect U.S.-Mexican wage gaps for skilled and unskilled workers. Paper presented to the XVII Latin American Meeting of the Econometric Society. ITAM, Cancun, Mexico. 

[14] Anderson, J.B., Dimon, D., and Brannon, J. (1995). Women’s labor force participation and migration to the Texas border region, Journal of Borderlands Studies, 10:2, 5-33. Anderson, J.B. and D. Dimon. (1999). Formal sector job growth and women’s labor sector participation: the case of Mexico, Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, 39:2, 169-91. Anderson, J.B. and Dimon, D. (1998). Married women’s labor force participation in developing countries: The case of Mexico, Estudios Económicos, 13:1, 3-34.

[15] Anderson, J.B. and Randall, L. (eds.) (1999). Schooling for Success: Preventing Repetition and Dropout in Latin American Primary Schools. Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe. Anderson, J.B. (2000). Factors affecting learning of Mexican primary school children. Estudios Económicos, 29:1, 117-52. Anderson, J.B. (2007). Social capital and student learning: Empirical results from Latin American primary schools. Economics of Education Review, 27:4, 439-449.  Anderson, J.B. (2008). Principal’s role and public primary school effectiveness in four Latin American Cities. The Elementary School Journal. 109:1, 36-60. 

[16] Anderson, J.B. and Gerber, J. (2004). A human development index for the United States-Mexico border. Journal of Borderlands Studies, 19:2, 1-26. Anderson, J.B. and Gerber, J. (2008). Fifty Years of Change on the U.S.-Mexico Border: Growth, Development, and the Quality of Life. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press.

[17] Anderson, J.B. and Gerber, J. (2023). The US-Mexico border human development index, 1990–2015: Improvements but still large gaps. Journal of Borderlands Studies, 58:1, 1-20.  Anderson, J.B. and Gerber, J. (2017). The US-Mexico border human development index, 1990-2010. Journal of Borderlands Studies. 32:3, 275-288.