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Economic opening and the dearth of federal-sponsored sectoral industrial policies pose a novel challenge for subnational governments at the dawn of the new century. This paper will argue that rather than the Mexican state entirely abandoning industrial policy, what really happened was that developmentalist functions were transferred to or appropriated by the subnational level. To do so, two states in the Mexican Republic whose sectoral industrial policies sharply contrast with the federal government-level backpedaling were examined. The literature of "new developmentalism" will serve as the backdrop to this new subnational role in Mexico, marking a divergence from the neoliberal paradigm at the federal level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets out to characterize the business dynamics of the software industries located in Mexico City, Monterrey, and Tijuana, beginning with a survey administered by the authors to 175 companies located in the aforementioned cities in 2014. The literature about this industry in Mexico has tended to favor theoretical approaches to innovation and learning and their subsequent application to local cases. This work relies on the logic of clusters (Porter, 1998) and therefore analyzes relationships with the local market in terms of sales and usage of human, financial, and informational resources, revealing regional differences in business dynamics. One important difference is the weight of local competition in Mexico City as compared with the two other cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On these current days, the world's economic map is dominated by clusters or economic groupings, present in almost all geographical levels, which have demonstrated to be critical masses with an unusual success on specific fields. Such clusters are groupings of firms and related institutions that compete, and at the same time cooperate. In this new context of economic activity organization, industrial groupings (clusters) are fundamental, and their performance has become a key factor for cities', regions' and nations' competitive advantages. In this paper, I analyze and implement a methodology that identifies benchmark clusters, useful for applied regional based economic studies. The approach addressed here, applied to the Mexican economy, is based on Feser and Bergman's methodology, and an extension due to Rey and Mattheis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]