Poll question:
How much have Mexico and China competed with each other economically since the 1980s?
a) alot
b) a little
c) more in the past, less now
d) less in the past, more now
Without having conducted any research on the topic and just piecing together limited data absorbed incidentally over the years, I think Mexico and China compete in a lot of the same sectors.
I think that while Mexican manufacturing for the US and Canadian market went up as a consequence of NAFTA and non—NAFTA reasons, it probably went up for less than expected for many years because of North American business’s reliance of plentiful and cheap Chinese supply.
I suspect that Chinese competition was like a hurricane system reaching its peak between 1997 and 2010 that suppressed what otherwise would have been a larger Mexican market share.
It took some time through the middle and early 90s for the Chinese export machine to build up steam, but it got huge.
Finally, I suspect that as Chinese has begun to move up the value chain and emphasized lower-end exports less, the hurricane has begun to pass and while this has opened up niches for other, poorer, Asian and African producers, it has probably allowed Mexico and Central America to compete a little more effectively in some sectors than they could have ten years ago.
The what if implication is that if Sino-US trade had been much less in the 1990s and 2000s, either for reasons of China following a different development model or more US restrictions on market access affecting China but not Mexico, Mexican manufacturing for North America could have been much bigger.
Thus is my hardly informed story of trilateral US-Chinese-Mexican trade relations?
Do you believe my story in whole in or in part?
If you doubt the story, what story would you propose to explain the arc of US-Chinese-Mexican trade relations over the last 30 years or so?