Alejandro Hope, security and justice editor at El Daily Post and a former Mexican intelligence official, said that in terms of cartel economics, "growing marijuana accounts for around a third of drug exports and significantly less in terms of revenue".
Although some European countries have introduced criminal sanctions and prison terms for cartel offenses, enforcement has been patchy.
But Economics 101 teaches that in the long term, most cartels are not very effective in raising the price of any commodity above that of what the market would produce.
The 76 year old Libyan was supposed to be replaced in 2012 at the end of his maximum second term, but the cartel members couldn't agree on a replacement.
According to this analysis, the suburb trails only Reynosa, Tamaulipas – the border city that serves as a base for the notorious Zeta cartel – in terms of security problems.
It did precisely that in the run-up to the Asian economic crisis a few years ago, and oil prices fell to around $10 a barrel.Even if Saudi Arabia somehow smooths over the meeting in Osaka, some argue, the longer-term picture for the cartel is bleak.
In other words, there is no absolute predominance of production cartel in terms of R&D effort.
Simple realities argue for the latter course: In the long term, even if bent by cartels, the law of supply and demand will rule.
The Zetas operate in more than half of Mexico's states and, according to US geopolitical analysis firm Stratfor, overtook their rivals from the Sinaloa cartel in 2012 in terms of geographic presence.
Environmental and Resource Economics, 5, 333 352.] model designed to analyze the long-term bilateral interdependence between a resource-exporting cartel and a coalition of resource-importing country governments for investigating under what conditions a carbon tax would make it possible for the coalition to appropriate part of the cartel's profits.
