Presentation

In its fifty-sixth issue, Papeles de POBLACIÓN celebrates 15 years of existence of the Center of Research and Advanced Studies on the Population. Our journal fulfills its particular role ofprivileged link among the community that studies population in its multiple dimensions. In every number we try to offer optimal explanations to what occurs in the socio-demographic and demographic under diverse preferences expressed by authors who have been validated by the national and international academic community; a glimpse of said approval is to be found in the 18 international indexes and databases which have included Papeles de POBLACIÓN. Other reasons of celebration for readers and authors, who publish in thisjournal, are:the fact that it is the most consulted publication on demography in the Network of Scientific Journals of Latin America, Spain and Portugal (Redalyc), according to which 26 thousand articles from our publications are downloaded, and the recent special recognition granted to Papeles de POBLACIÓN by the Latin American Council of Social Sciences in the framework of the Fund of Support to Journals of Social Sciences of Latin America and the Caribbean "Juan Carlos Portantier" Clacso contest.

As usual, the articles in Papeles de POBLACIÓN appear grouped in sections, which are now centered on three topics, namely: remittances, a subject that has not reached a consensus in its measurement and national, regional and local economic impact; the determinants of migration; and finally, mortality by external causes in some contexts in Mexico and Colombia.

We open with the article by Germán Zárate-Hoyos, who argues that international migration and remittances are strategic supplies for the economic stability of a country such as Mexico, yet he questions the real amount of the flow of the official stats. Particularly, he challenges the lack of a clear methodology for capturing collective remittances and even social remittances, which are difficult to measure. The author supports that it is important to understand that the failure of the neoliberal policies to stimulate economic growth and sustained employment are the cause of the increment of migration. This is the reason why he argues that the relation between migration and neoliberal policies should be closely examined, before considering remittances as a panacea for development.

Jorge Eduardo Mendoza Cota and Eliseo Díaz González, researchers from El Colegio de la Frontera Norte (COLEF) seek to determine to which extent remittances have become a factor of economic production, from the viewpoint of productive investment funding. In particular, and due to the magnitude and fast growth of remittances in Mexico, it is important to determine the characteristics and specific weight these monetary resources have on financing productive investment in the recipient households. Their results suggest that the use of remittances cannot be distinguished from that of other resources at hand, in the case of the analyzed group. The three sources of income considered show a significant determination on the savings and expenditures, yet to pay off negative balances they only rely on the incomes from the business, this was verified applying a hypothesis test to the results in a base model.

On their own, Germán Vega Briones and Liliana Huerta Rodríguez, also from COLEF, analyze households and remittances in two Mexican states of international migration: the cases of Hidalgo and Nayarit, where they analyze the way the size and sort of house hold influences on the reception ofremittances from the United States. Distinguishable is the fact that the cases correspond to two differenced regions; whilst Nayarit is considered part of the region with lengthy migratory tradition, Hidalgo is part of the emergent migratory regions. Researchers Alejandro Díaz Garay and María del Carmen Juárez Gutiérrez, from Universidad Autónoma de Guerrero and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, respectively, expose their findings on the characteristics of international migration in the State of Guerrero, Mexican Federal State which has experienced an important growth in international migration as of the last decade of XX century. The authors measure the social impact of international migration and the economic impact of familial and collective remittances; in order to acknowledge said aspects ofmigration they applied a survey and diverse interviews by means of which they conclude that familial remittances usually fulfill the basic needs of the household, while collective remittances attenuate marginalization. By and large, remittances are mainly destined for the consumption ofbasic goods and services, and marginally, for employment-generating investment.

The second section of the journal comprises in the first place an article by André Braz Golgher, Carlos Henrique Rosa and Ari Francisco de Araújo Junior, from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais; they approach the topic of determinants on internal migration in Brazil using the neoclassical model of human capital. The authors apply a multiple regression macro model on the basis of the gravity model and Poisson distribution; in the empirical model, the number of migrants between meso-regions was the variable of response; the socioeconomic aspects, penal and geographic were explanatory. They conclude that distance, regional polarization and that of the urban centers influence on the migratory processes.

Enrique Pérez Campuzano and Clemencia Santos Cerquera, from Instituto Politécnico Nacional and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, deal with the topic of urbanization and internal migration between Mexican cities. Their central argumentation is that the urban system undergoes the phase called 'reversion ofpolarity', which is characterized by a slower growth rhythm of the large metropolises and the emergence of new cities; they present evidence of the importance the study ofmigration between cities has on the distribution ofurban population and perform a multilevel regression exercise to explore the most important factors in determining the probability of migration between metropolitan zones.

María Eugenia Anguiano Téllez, researcher from COLEF, explores the condition of the State of Chiapas as a territory of trans-border labor mobility, as well as its increasing participation in intra-regional, national and international emigration, and its situation as a space of migratory transit of people -mostly Guatemalan and Central Americans in general- who head toward other Mexican States and the United States in the search for labor opportunities. The author analyzes information provided by the National Institute of Geography, Statistics and Computing, the National Council of Population, the National Institute of Migration and two surveys of flow in which Colegio de la Frontera Norte partakes.

The third section is composed of works that describe mortality by external causes. The work by Doris Cardona Arango, researcher from Universidad de Antioquia, describes the behavior of mortality by external causes in the city of Medellin, Colombia, between the years of 1999 and 2006, according to gender, age and basic cause of death. Ms. Cardona concludes that the highest mortality rate has been in the age group from 20 to 24 years of age (27.6 per hundred thousand inhabitants), a fact that deserves special attention because of the social, familial and labor implications that the decease of people in productive ages represents; the main external cause of death in most of the demographic group was homicide, with the exception of underage and elderly populations, where traffic accidents and traumas from falls or non-intentional accidents were the main factors.

On their own David F. Fuentes Romero and Irma A. González Hernández, from Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, analyze deaths by violence of women in the northern border of Mexico. The work analyzes the profile of violent deaths in women from the city of Tijuana, Baja California, being them one of the most evident manifestations of the situation that prevails in the border region in relation to violence. The data in relation to the 384 victims were collected from forensic and newspaper sources as well as from the analysis derived from the files of the malice aforethought murders.

Indeed the articles proposed in this issue will cause new controversies and agreements in the theories and empiric literature which implicitly carries a good dose of intuition to understand the macro and the particularities of the topics here exposed.

Juan Gabino González Becerril
Editor