PurposeThis study estimated total import demand elasticities concerning income, import prices and domestic prices. A high propensity to import constitutes a significant obstacle to economic growth in Mexico since the benefits of increased exports or any other aggregate demand expansion leak to the rest of the world.Design/methodology/approachThis paper estimated a Vector Error Correction Model of the total import demand elasticities concerning income, import prices and domestic prices. Total imports are a dependent variable, while Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and import and domestic prices are the independent variables.FindingsThe principal finding is that an increase of 1 peso in the Mexican GDP leads to a rise of 0.50 pesos in Mexican imports; the elasticity of import demand for prices is low. Still, the elasticity of import demand for domestic prices is 2.14 times greater than that for import prices. These results have significant economic policy implications, such as promoting the expansion of the domestic market and the national content of exports.Research limitations/implicationsIt is tempting to estimate the import demand function for the entire 1993–2019 period since such data is available. But by doing so, the authors would overestimate the propensity to import, given that from 1993 to 2019, the proportion of imports as a percentage of GDP went from 11.37 in 1993 to 29.66 in 2019. Therefore, it makes more sense to estimate the import demand function from 2000 to 2019, a period with a stable proportion of imports to GDP.Originality/valueA high level of imports in developing countries means that much of their aggregate demand is filtered abroad. Therefore, the low impact of its exports on GDP is related to the Mexican economy’s high imports. The authors calculate this relationship with new data and methods.

Este documento estudia las relaciones de corto y largo plazo entre el comercio, la inversión y el crecimiento económico chino desde 1992 hasta 2019. Se estimó un modelo de corrección de errores vectoriales (CEV) para analizar las relaciones causales entre la balanza comercial, la inversión (tanto nacional como extranjera), y el crecimiento económico. Los resultados nos ayudaron a discutir los mecanismos considerados dentro de la literatura mercantilista para relacionar una balanza comercial positiva y el crecimiento económico. La estimación sugiere un mecanismo causal entre las variables más cercana a la explicación del mercantilismo financiero o del desarrollismo frente al acercamiento del mercantilismo monetario. Esto es, el efecto positivo de la balanza comercial sobre el crecimiento económico de China parece estar relacionado con el aumento de la inversión nacional en vez de la atracción de inversión extranjera directa.

La maquila de programa temporal de empleo devino en permanente, como estrategia para acelerar el crecimiento industrial. Después de tres décadas de existencia, sus efectos en la productividad, la integración de valor agregado nacional y el crecimiento de todo el sector manufacturero no cumplen lo esperado. Los factores que explican este resultado son la operación de los estímulos otorgados por los gobiernos de Estados Unidos y de México; la racionalidad económica de la fragmentación en escala global del proceso productivo y la gran distancia tecnológica que separa las economías de los dos países.

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The most developed countries have generally had an active State, a driving, regulatory and protectionist State, among other roles, although the most consolidated concept seems to be that of a developmental State. In this paper, a social accounting matrix of Mexico is constructed in order to design a dynamic-recursive applied general equilibrium model to analyse and quantify the impact of policies that were promoted by the State; in particular, policies aimed at increasing private savings and subsidies for the consumption of domestic inputs. The implementation of these simple policies was found to have a substantial positive impact overall, from which important economic policy elements for a development strategy emerge.