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La apertura de la economía mexicana transformó por completo la dinámica de crecimiento del Producto Interno Bruto (PIB) per cápita de los diversos estados del país, con una clara tendencia a concentrar el crecimiento en regiones específicas. En este estudio, cuantificamos el efecto derrame o indirecto de la complejidad económica sobre el crecimiento con base en los siguientes dos hechos: i) la complejidad económica es un factor importante para explicar las tasas de crecimiento del PIB, y ii) hay un patrón regional claro en la complejidad económica de los estados, i.e., la variable complejidad económica muestra una autocorrelación espacial positiva. Nuestros resultados muestran: i) que el efecto derrame o indirecto estimado de la complejidad en el crecimiento es positivo y no insignificante, particularmente para los estados del norte del país, cuya propia complejidad económica es tan importante como la de sus vecinos. Por el contrario, el efecto indirecto en los estados del sur es negativo. Estar ubicado al lado de estados con bajos niveles de complejidad económica tiene una externalidad negativa significativa que casi anula el efecto positivo del propio nivel de complejidad de un estado. Nuestros hallazgos nos llevan a concluir que los efectos indirectos pueden haber jugado un papel más importante para explicar el patrón diverso de crecimiento entre el norte y el sur de México de lo que se pensaba anteriormente., The opening up of the Mexican economy completely transformed the growth dynamics of the per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the country’s various states, with a clear tendency towards growth being concentrated in specific regions. In this study, we quantify the indirect or spillover effect of economic complexity on growth based on the following two facts: i) economic complexity is an important factor in explaining GDP growth rates, and ii) there is a clear regional pattern in the states’ economic complexity, i.e., the economic complexity variable shows a positive spatial autocorrelation. Our results provide two insights: first, that the estimated positive spillover effect of complexity on growth is not negligible, particularly for states in the north of the country, whose own economic complexity is as important as that of their neighbors. In contrast, the spillover effect in southern states is negative. Being located next to states with low levels of economic complexity has a significant negative externality that almost overrides the positive effect of a state’s own level of complexity. Our findings lead us to conclude that spillover effects may have played a more important role in explaining the diverse pattern of growth between northern and southern Mexico than previously thought.

Mexican economic historiography recognizes the key role that public investment played in the country's economic performance from the post-revolutionary period until the beginning of the economic liberalization that began in the mid-1980s. However, there is no concrete empirical evidence that this was the case. In this study, the authors construct a historical database of public investment - both total and broken down into its main components - for the period from 1925 to 1981, in order to measure the impact it had on economic activity. Given the possible presence of crowding-out effects between public investment and private investment, in their analysis the authors control for the latter. The results suggest that public investment had a significant impact on output one which varies depending on the category of public investment considered.

We show that the use of the real effective exchange rate to test for purchasing power parity, as in Astorga (2012) and other studies, is subject to a problem that biases tests against finding evidence of PPP. The problem is illustrated using Astorga´s data on six Latin American countries.

We analyze the relationship between the economic growth rate and a rule of law indicator in Mexican states during the period 2006-2013. Specifically, we employ information regarding the time it takes to solve commercial disputes in local courts, which we use as a proxy variable to measure the efficiency of the justice system. In principle, we expect that the shorter the time it takes to resolve commercial disputes, the higher the growth rates will be in the states where the firms are located. The results suggest that a 100-day decrease in the average time it takes to resolve a commercial dispute is associated with an increase of 0.6 percent in the growth rate of state per capita GDP.

In this study we use data on the productive structure of Mexican states to compute a measure of economic complexity for each, as well as for each economic activity conducted there. The results show that the states differ in terms of the economic activities in which they specialize and, therefore, also in terms of their economic complexity. As previous studies have shown, at an international level, there is evidence to affirm that the measure of economic complexity is relevant in explaining the observed economic disparities, since it is positively related to both the levels of wealth and the growth rates of the states.

This appendix presents an extended explanation for our finding of mean reversion of the real exchange rate to a shifting mean using monthly data for Mexico, 1969-2010. Because such shifts coincide with trade liberalization in Mexico, we conclude that changes in the tradable/nontradable goods composition of the price index used in the empirical estimations caused the mean shifts.