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The aim of the paper is to determine the effect of extreme wealth on economic development (human development index and sub-indices) in 64 countries during 2005-2018, with special emphasis on Mexico and China. A dynamic estimation (sys-GMM) is followed. Estimations show that extreme national wealth acts as a constraint on human development for the entire sample of countries, including Mexico and China. Income is found to be most sensitive to this type of wealth, followed by the education index. The analysis confirms that democracy, economic freedom, investment and social spending are underlying factors of HDI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1980s, Mexico switched from a policy of import substitution to export-oriented development. From 1994, it participated in a North–South free trade agreement with the United States and Canada (North American Free Trade Agreement – NAFTA). The agreement strongly reflected the asymmetric power of the three participants, although some Mexico's regions served as production platforms in global value chains. Under NAFTA, Mexico's overall growth was insipid, yet a trade surplus with the United States was the excuse for Donald Trump's government to impose a renegotiation that led in 2020 to a new agreement (US, Mexico, Canada Agreement – USMCA) with terms yet more favourable to the United States. In the light of this experience and the political and economic factors that explain it, this paper studies to the need to get Mexico's trade policies right through permanent consideration to the development needs in the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate comparatively the quality of exports from Mexico and South Korea. The indicators used are the following: domestic value-added (va) embodied in exports; decomposition of domestic value-added between direct, generated indirectly exporting activities, and indirect, created in those that produce inputs that are embodied in exports; use of domestic va embodied in exports by the rest of the world, divided between the parts to produce exports and for uses other than exports; domestic employment contained in exports, both for directly and indirectly exporting activities; labor productivity in the export sector in direct and indirect exporting activities; and wages per worker in the export sector, also classified between those that export directly and those that supply inputs to exporting activities. All indicators are broken down by technological level of exports according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's (oecd) classification (2011). The data analysis allows us to conclude that, despite the high weight of manufacturing exports, particularly those of high and medium-high technology, in total exports of Korea and Mexico, the quality of these exports of the former is much higher than those of the latter: domestic va contained in their exports (as a percentage of exports) is notably higher; they are more integrated into the global value networks of parts and components; domestic linkages, measured by the indirect jobs they generate, are more intense; and labor productivity and, consequently, wages per employee in export activity are three times higher than in Mexico. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]