Política de prestigio como herramienta de proyección

supervisor at that time, Professor David Sapsford. All o f the empirical analysis has been updated in this version to include the latest available data, and the discussion has been redrafted to tie it together with the analysis conducted in the foregoing chapters.

2 Mexico is a more suitable choice for our purposes than any o f the central and eastern European states that have recently joined the EU because it has been a member of NAFTA for over 10 years now and this affords us considerable data with which to contrast the FDI and export performance o f a pre- NAFTA Mexico.

3 Between 1930 and 1970 the share of manufacturing in Mexican GDP grew from 12.9% to 23.3%, and Mexico City’s share of manufacturing employment grew from 19.0% to 47.3% (Hanson, 1998).

join the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)4. Hanson (1998) even suggests that given the geographical proximity o f Mexico and the US, trade liberalisation by Mexico in 1985 constituted the beginning o f integration, with NAFTA merely finalising the process a decade later.

The proximity o f the world’s most powerful nation is another reason why the Mexican economy provides such an interesting case study. Over the last two decades the US has consistently been the source o f over half o f Mexico’s inward FDI (see Table 6.1). The attraction o f FDI is that it is supposedly “a composite bundle o f capital, technology, and know-how” (Balasubramanyam et al., 1996, p.6) that can be harnessed by the host economy to help narrow the ‘ideas gap’ (Romer, 1993) and hence increase domestic productivity. The degree to which FDI embodies technology and know-how will evidently vary from one investment to another. Given that the technological sophistication o f the source country is likely to be one important determinant, the fact that the majority o f Mexico’s FDI comes from the US suggests that Mexico may be in an excellent position to benefit from FDI (and is therefore an ideal candidate in which to test for possible FDI spillovers).

This Chapter is organised as follows. Section 6.2 looks at the volume and structure o f Mexican inward FDI. The determinants o f this FDI are discussed in section 6.3. Section 6.4 reviews the extant literature on FDI spillovers. The results o f a simple

4 In 1985 import licenses covered 92.2% o f national production, the average tariff was 23.5%, and 85.0% o f non-petroleum exports were covered by export controls. By 1987 export controls had been abolished, import licenses covered only 25.5% o f national production, and the average tariff was down to 11.8% (Hanson, 1997).

time series analysis o f the growth effects o f FDI in Mexico are presented in section 6.5, and section 6.6 concludes and offers some policy proposals.

Table 6.1 FDI Participation in Mexico, 1976-1994 (%)

Period US Germany Japan UK Switzerland Spain France

1976-94 62.3 7.3 7.3 3.9 5.1 2.8 3.1

1976-80 68.7 11.6 14.8 3.8 9.0 4.2 0.5

1981-85 63.0 8.7 6.3 3.3 4.1 3.4 3.6

1986-90 58.1 5.2 3.7 9.0 3.7 2.1 5.0

1991-94 58.6 2.9 3.7 7.9 3.4 1.4 4.6

N o tes: T able sh o w s th e o w n ersh ip p e r c e n ta g e o f th e to ta l sto c k o f M exican in w a rd FDI. S ou rce: L o v e a n d L a g e-H id a lg o (2000)

Table 6.2 FDI Flows to Mexico post-NAFTA by Country of Origin, 1994-2004 (%)

Year US G erm an y Japan U K S w itze rla n d Spain F ran ce Canac

1994 46.7 2.9 5.9 5.6 0.5 1.4 0.8 6.9 1995 65.8 6.6 1.9 2.6 2.4 0.6 1.5 2.0 1996 67.3 2.6 1.8 1.0 1.1 0.9 1.6 6.9 1997 61.1 4.0 2.9 15.2 0.2 2.7 0.5 2.0 1998 65.3 1.6 1.2 2.1 0.6 4.1 1.5 2.6 1999 53.4 5.6 9.2 -1.4 0.9 7.8 1.3 4.6 2000 71.2 2.0 2.4 1.6 0.9 12.3 -14.6 3.9 2001 77.3 -0.5 2.7 0.3 0.5 2.5 1.4 3.6 2002 63.6 3.8 1.0 7.5 2.8 4.3 1.7 1.2 2003 55.0 3.6 1.0 8.3 2.5 13.9 3.5 1.8 2004 42.4 2.1 1.0 0.7 6.6 39.4 0.8 2.2

N o tes: T able sh o w s th e o w n ersh ip p e r c e n ta g e o f the to ta l annual inflow o f F D I to M exico f o r the y e a r s 1 9 9 4 to 2004.

S ource: S ecreta ria d e E con om ia (w w w .econ om ia.gob.m x)

6.2 VOLUM E AND STRUCTURE OF INW ARD FDI

Mexico has long been a large recipient o f FDI. During the 1980s it accounted for approximately 10 percent o f all FDI flows to developing countries and roughly a quarter o f all flows to Latin America (Love and Lage-Hidalgo, 2000). Though many Mexicans once lamented that they were “so far from heaven and so close to the United States” (Blomstrom and Kokko, 1997, p.21), Mexico’s proximity to the world’s largest economy is perhaps its greatest advantage. Table 6.1 illustrates the primacy o f the US in Mexican inward FDI.

Despite a modest decline in FDI participation in Mexico by the US between 1976 and 1994, the US remains by far the largest single investor. One o f the principal advantages o f this for Mexico is that the US economy is at the technological frontier and it may be expected that US FDI may be managerially and technologically well- endowed. The principal advantage for researchers is that the US collects the most comprehensive data on the activities o f its multinationals abroad, and hence provides detailed information pertaining to roughly 60 percent o f all FDI inflows into Mexico. Few other countries, if any, offer this wealth o f data.

Figure 6.1 shows the stock and flows o f FDI from the US to Mexico for the years 1966 to 2000. As flows in any individual year are heavily influenced by individual undertakings, they show a marked volatility in comparison with the stock data. For this reason, it is preferable to analyse the FDI trend by consideration o f the stock as opposed to the flow. Whilst the figure shows a gradual increase in FDI stock from the

outset, there appears to be a dramatic increase in FDI during the nineties5. In fact, Graham and Wada (2000) report that there is a trend break in 1989.

It is interesting that the timing o f this trend break precedes the implementation o f NAFTA by some five years. During the negotiations o f NAFTA there was considerable concern expressed in the US and Canada that the abundant supply o f cheap labour in Mexico would lead to sizeable negative effects on domestic wages and employment6. What these concerns overlooked, however, was that trade and investment liberalisation in Mexico had begun in earnest ten years earlier; with corresponding adjustments in trade and investment volumes already having taken place7. Graham and Wada (2000) report that the earliest indications that NAFTA was in the ‘pipeline’ were from ‘leaked’ reports from the Mexican Government in the spring o f 1990, and so “the trend break cannot be attributed to NAFTA nor even to expectations that it would occur” (p.781).

Recognising that FDI typically involves long lead times between the decision o f firms to invest and the actual investment taking place, Graham and Wada (2000) further discount the re-election o f the incumbent Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in 1988 and significant liberalisation o f the Law on Foreign Investment (LFI) in 1989 as explanations o f the trend break.

5 Note that the apparent drop in stock in 1982 is due to a recalibration o f the data by the US Department o f Commerce and not an actual withdrawal o f foreign investors (Graham & Wada, 2000).

6 Ross Perot, a former US Presidential Candidate, argued that NAFTA would create a “giant sucking