A LESSON FROM SOUTHEAST ASIA?
Grinspun, Ricardo & Cameron, Maxwell
MEXICO HAS THE POTENTIAL FOR A MORE equitable and beneficial type of economic growth. Economist Ren6 Villareal, for example, has recently argued that "the most viable Mexican industrialization...
...An efficient state bureaucracy had the institutional capacity and independence to run such a strategy...
...1. Ren6 Villareal, "The Latin American Strategy of Import Substitution: Failure or Paradigm For the Region...
...backward by encouraging the use of intermediate inputs made by domestic industry...
...Moreover, industrialization was preceded by a massive redistribution of wealth and income through land reform...
...These reforms increased employment and reduced poverty in the countryside, slowing emigration to the cities...
...in Gary Gereffi and Donald L. Wyman, eds., Manufacturing Miracles: Paths of Industrialization in Latin America and East Asia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 316...
...Strong state intervention in South Korea had a key role in turning private-sector activities into a coherent industrialization strategy...
...Export-processing zones quickly became a source of forward and backward linkages-forward through rising real wages that created demand for other industrial and agricultural goods...
...2.These issues are discussed at length in different chapters of Gereffi and Wyman, Manufacturing Miracles...
...In turn, this external orientation should be supported by (3) a process of selective import-substitution industrialization in which links in the productive chain are created that promote intra-industrial and inter-sectoral articulation, and competitive and efficient production...
...2 Unfortunately, NAFTA conditionality precludes Mexico from engaging in these types of policies...
...Economist Ren6 Villareal, for example, has recently argued that "the most viable Mexican industrialization strategy involves (1) an expansion of manufacturing exports and (2) endogenous industrial growth centering on basic goods and inputs...
...South Korea, for example, never adopted indiscriminate economic liberalization, but rather a mix of active export promotion and efficient import substitution...
...Foreign and domestic private investment was directed and controlled to avoid the creation of "enclave" economies...
...A more equitable distribution of income created the foundation for an expanding domestic market, so that growth was both outward- and inward-oriented...
...Mexico must first free itself from such external constraints before it can engage in a different type of developmental policy...
...Such a strategy draws upon the experience of the Southeast Asian "tigers": South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong...
...Indeed, some lessons can be learned from these tigers since every facet of the new Mexican industrialization strategy differs markedly from their export-led success...
Vol. 26 • February 1993 • No. 4
