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A standardized coefficients model to explain and assess the importance of some factors that currently are contributing to patenting level in the Mexican states is proposed. From a theoretical point of view, patenting level may be the result of several factors such as the growth of the high-tech industries, education expenditure, schooling level, scientific research projects, and agglomeration activities, among others. The relative importance of such factors on patenting level is assessed. It seems that trade liberalization has encouraged vertical links via patenting, but technology and ideas are not disseminating across states, indicating that invents from firms—both residents and nonresidents—are private and not easily spread to other firms. From the empirical results, we conclude that public knowledge capital and high-tech industries must become high-priority objectives for the government policies in order to affect regional inventiveness capacity, and so, the long-term economic growth.

This work analyzes if there has been a structural change in the flow of patents in Mexico, as a consequence of institutional reforms and economic policies. To explore the structural change hypothesis, time series models and unit root tests are used in both series of patents applications for the country’s residents and nonresidents. The analysis indicates that misleading conclusions can be obtained if the presence of structural breaks is not taken into account. Results show until two structural breaks in each series that are widely linked with changes in the economic activity. However, the structural changes occurred in each series, disagree in the estimated breakpoint, for the residents’ series it seems to occur before of the trade openness, meanwhile for the nonresidents the two break points are estimated after the trade openness. Intuitively, innovation activities become more important with the arrival of multinationals as a consequence of the liberal reforms. Our findings about the presence of two structural breaks characterizing the patents series would be indicating that the Mexican economy has experienced a process of technology learning due to the trade reforms implemented since the 1980s, a result in concordance with the theories that sustain that trade liberalization promotes economic growth.