Mexico has experienced many economic, social and political reforms in recent history that have led it to become a more developed country. Typically, when people think of Mexico, they think of corruption in government, violent drug cartels, widespread poverty, and long-standing single-party dominance in government. While these are important problems, they are not problems that are impossible to solve or in the process of solving. They are not even persistent throughout Mexico, there are places where poverty, violent drug cartels and corruption are non-existent. Mexico is often misunderstood and generalized for some defects and characteristics it possesses. According to the previously accepted definition, Mexico is a third world country. But in today's terms countries are either developing or developed, and Mexico is often seen as a developing country despite containing many qualities that would make it a developed country. Looking back at the major events of Mexican history there are clear deficiencies within the thinking. government process. There have been cases of poor decision-making since the discovery of oil in 1970. When Mexico began to benefit from the discovery of oil, everything was positive. Mexico became an oil exporter rather than an importer, which caused a temporary recovery from debt and grew the economy by increasing exports and stopping oil imports; although in the long run the oil discoveries proved more harmful than anything else. The peso became overvalued, which caused non-oil exports to cripple during the 1970s. The peso continued to increase in value until 1980, when it collapsed causing the second development of the peso... mid-paper... and the exchange rate, creating a very stale country. With legitimate elections and politicians it creates competition, competition is good only because it eliminates evil and imposes improvement with good. This applies perfectly to government officials: if they remain in office and make no changes, they will not be re-elected to office when elections are held again. Even without solving the corruption problem, Mexico is becoming a more developed country with improvements such as the end of the PRI's reign, the signing of NAFTA, the boom in auto production and some minor reforms such as subsidies for the poor. Mexico has many characteristics that would lead people to believe it is a developing country, but Mexico has made tremendous improvements in society and infrastructure that arguably make it more of a developed country than anything else.