Technical and structural change, and the fall in the manufacturing output–capital ratio in Mexico, 1990–2015

Abstract

The article studies the fall in the manufacturing output–capital (OC) ratio in Mexico in the post-trade liberalisation period 1990–2015. From a classical perspective, a pattern of falling OC ratio, rising labour productivity and greater capital intensity can be interpreted as a case of Marx-biased technical change. A within–between-industry decomposition shows, however, that in Mexico the fall in the average OC ratio reflects not only within-industry technical change but also structural change, in the form of a change in the composition of the capital stock towards industries with low or declining OC ratios. Econometric estimations, moreover, show that within-industry technical change was not related to the initial level or change in domestic labour costs, as in the dominant interpretation of the sources of Marx-biased technical change, but was driven instead by Mexico’s industrial integration with the USA. Within-industry technical change—and convergence to US OC ratios—dominated in an early phase, but were replaced by structural change and divergence in a later phase, following the China shock of the early 2000s. Irrespective of the source of change in the average OC ratio, though, both within-industry technical change in the early phase and structural change in the late one tended to reduce the average profit rate in the Mexican manufacturing sector.