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Like the rest of the poor periphery, Mexico fought with de-industrialization in the century before the 1870s. Yet, Mexican manufacturing defended itself better than did the rest of the poor periphery. Why Mexican exceptionalism? This article decomposes the sources of de-industrialization into productivity events abroad, globalization forces connecting Mexico to those markets, and domestic forces. It uses a neo-Ricardian model to implement the decomposition, advocates a price dual approach, and develops a new price and wage data base. Mexican exceptionalism was due to weaker Dutch disease effects, better wage competitiveness, and the policy autonomy to foster industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although sociologists have expressed growing interest in globalization, they have devoted little sustained empirical attention to the many claims made in its name. I focus on the link that has been drawn between globalization and the deindustrialization of the advanced industrial societies. To examine this, I employ a pooled time-series of cross-sections data set that combines observations on 18 OECD nations across the 1968-1992 period. Fixed-effects regression models that control for unmeasured country-specific effects reveal support for arguments that implicate foreign direct investment and North-South trade in the declining percentage of the labor force employed in manufacturing in the OECD countries. Regression results also show that deindustrialization across this period is largely explained by a model that combines an attention to the post-Golden Age "troubles" of northern manufacturing with classic generalizations of the process of development. Interpretation of the empirical findings is tempered by an exercise in counterfactual history, which reveals that deindustrialization would have been considerable in these countries even if the upswings in direct investment and southern imports had not occurred or if the performance of the manufacturing sector had been stronger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on globalization and deindustrialization. The older globalization consisted of a world system of Western nation states and a set of peripheral regions undergoing the first agonies of modernization. The new globalization, by contrast, encourages economic and political elites in Metropolitan centers to slough off those formerly powerful sentiments of national identity and purpose, even as it encourages subaltern classes to celebrate patriotism and sacrifice for their respective nations. Hence, in the name of a "new internationalism," the multinationals are free to pursue communally destructive forms of "flexible accumulation" and speculative gains wherever they find them, while the working class is rendered powerless to fend off these new forces of communal devastation. In each case, the stabilizing cultural conventions and social contracts that once allowed workers some relative sense of security are being dismantled and replaced by a lean set of postmodern social relations that are more in keeping with the new forms of time and space compressions characterizing the emergent New World Order.