La organización industrial, productividad y estrategias empresariales en México

This work adjusts the conventional industrial organization concepts to include the evolutionary approach that characterises sectors according to major trends of technical change, estimating sectoral changes of total factor productivity. The first section shows estimates of high concentration in Mexican industry, but identifies a wide variety of competitive conditions and of competitive factors according to the industrial sectors and the dominant economic agents. In the second section we further explore the importance of alternative productive strategies for foreign and national firms, and consider these in the context of the national system of innovation. Major agents in the analysis are transnational corporations (TNC) and large domestic conglomerates competing in export markets. The competitive success can be based in productivity gains, though these are not necessarily related to new investment modernization measures. In fact, there are many industries, and many of them in control of TNC, where productivity advances through the rationalization of idle capacity and the new design of existing plants. The two kinds of competitive strategy imply very different effects on the long term growth, and most notably on their distinct contribution to the domestic integration of industrial clusters, including traditional industries and science and technology related industries.