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Introduction

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NAFTA and the Mexican Manufacturing Sector

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Abstract

In Mexico, public policy has adhered to economic orthodox guidelines in exemplary fashion. Capitalizing on the advantages afforded by geographic proximity to the US market and the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), large transnational corporations have invested in the country; and the growth of exports of Mexican-assembled products has outpaced world trade as a whole. Nonetheless, the external competitiveness of the model’s leading industries has been unable to counteract the deindustrialization process in non-globalized subsectors of the economy, which have to compete in the domestic market with imports that benefit from the adopted measures. In this context, this book aims to analyse, for the period 1994–2008, the effects of public policy on labour productivity, production concentration and dynamic competitiveness in the main Mexican manufacturing industries (Food, beverages and tobacco; Textiles and apparel; Chemistry; Electromechanics).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Yeung (2009, p. 213) defines strategic coupling as the dynamic process through which economic agents in either cities or regions, or both, coordinate, mediate, and arbitrate strategic interests between local stakeholders and their counterparts in the global economy.

  2. 2.

    Foreign Trade Enterprises Programme (ECEX) and Highly Exporting Enterprises Programme (ALTEX).

  3. 3.

    Temporary Import Programme for Export (PITEX); Programme of the Manufacturing, Maquila and Export Service Industry (IMMEX), and the Programme of Import Duty Refunds to Exporters (DRAWBACK).

  4. 4.

    Ocampo (2005) extensively defines the concept of complementarities, referring not only to the role of backward and forward linkages as defined by Hirschman (1958), but also to the role of public, private, or mixed institutions created to reduce the cost of information.

  5. 5.

    Kaplinsky (2000) defines the concept as the “role of coordination and identification of dynamic opportunities for the realization of income as well as the allocation of activities to the different participants in the production process”.

  6. 6.

    The productivity indicator cannot be calculated for five activity classes (321111, 382301, 383202, 384204, 385006) out of the 205 covered by the survey, because data on the value of output or man-hours worked in those activities are not available for the period 2003–2008. Fine-tuning the analysis, two equal sub-periods were defined (1994–2001 and 2001–2008) to facilitate comparisons and take account of the widely acknowledged that the economic liberalization strategy fueled employment growth in the first years of its application in the country.

  7. 7.

    The sum of these three branches in the estimates made accounted for 48.1% of food, beverage, and tobacco sector production in 2008.

  8. 8.

    The characteristics of the chemical sector make it particularly difficult to study as a whole; these include its complex nature, wide variety of activities with diverse capital and labour content, and the relevance of very dynamic R&D investment (dabbling currently in biotechnology). This is partly the reason why there is such a dearth of serious studies about this sector in Mexico.

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  1. Institute of Economic Research (IIEc.), National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Mexico City, Mexico

    Raúl Vázquez-López

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Vázquez-López, R. (2020). Introduction. In: NAFTA and the Mexican Manufacturing Sector. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55265-7_1

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