The US Market and Its Implications for Mexican trade: The Case of the Manufacturing Industry

This paper is concerned with the foreign trade of the United States and its relation with its main commercial partners, focusing essentially to the manufacturing industry. With this purpose the index of revealed comparative advantages in order to identifying the countries that have greater advantages on that market and compared them with the case of Mexico. The period of analysis goes from 1990 to 2004. One of the most striking results of this research is that China had come increasing the trade with the United States in such a way that at the moment it is his main supplier of manufactures, surpassing to Japan, Mexico and Canada. The index of comparative advantages indicates that Mexico increased its specialization in the United States, but did not increase comparative advantages from 0.33 in 1990 to 0.71 in 2004. In 2001 it obtained comparative advantages of 1.05, but the economic recession of the United States caused the reduction of this in the following years. The high economic and political dependency of the foreign trade of Mexico with the economy of the United States has restrained the growth of Mexican manufacturing exports.