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This paper explores the Mexico City Government's accountability with respect to public debt in the time period 1999-2015. The questions we pose are as follows: To which projects were resources emanating from public debt allocated? Did the accountability mechanisms make it possible to evaluate the projects funded with public debt? Although the laws stipulate that entities are bound to be transparent about their allocation of debt, there is clearly only partial accountability when it comes to all of the funding models, including: private banking, development banking, the stock market, and public-private partnerships (PPP). Moreover, the opacity is total where evaluating outcomes is concerned. Using a cointegration test for debt and public investment, we assert that total public debt has some effect on the behavior of public investment in Mexico City. [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]

The agglomeration of cultural / creative industries and specialized retail stores in urban districts marked by a rapid urban transformation process has been identified as "Creative Districts". It has been assumed that these districts are economic clusters in the sense of being an economic system formed by specialized companies and their corresponding labor market. From our point of view these districts are only a visible part of a larger economic cluster operating at the metropolitan scale which includes many different areas, enterprises and jobs. In this paper we discuss the conceptual and methodological problems of bringing the concept of economic cluster or industrial district to the intra-urban geographic scale. In order to confront the idea of 'creative districts' as functional economic areas separable from the rest of the metropolitan economy, we apply the methods commonly used in urban studies on creative industries to identify possible creative districts within Mexico City. The identified districts are contrasted in their economic structures to determine if there are indications that indeed they are differentiable and functional economic clusters from the rest of the metropolitan area. We conclude by arguing that the data found sustain the existence of a single metropolitan economic cluster and no small clusters in urban districts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]