| Summary: | The text emphasizes the operating conditions of Mexico’s international trade between 2018 and 2020, and shows, on the one hand, the strengthening commercial ties with its counterparts in Asia-Pacific region, and on the other, the new trends towards the regionalization of transnational corporations’ productive and commercial strategies and Mexico’s potentially central role in that process. In that context, the article highlights the logic of “importing to export” that determines Mexico's specialization as a producer and exporter of manufactured goods. Through this approach, during the twenty-first century the Mexican economy has moved from trade triangulation by "importing inputs from China to manufacture products for export to the United States" to the quadrangular “exporting of direct investments from developed countries to developing countries in Asia Pacific, to produce exportable inputs to Mexico, to process and export themto the United States.” To a large extent, this process is the logical outcome of the China-United States trade dispute and has been accompanied by the export of direct investments and productive inputs from Japan and Korea to Mexico, for export to the U.S. market. On the Mexican side, these developments have begun a process of substitution of inputs that were previously imported with locally produced intermediate consumer goods by transnational corporations and by their suppliers located in Mexico; this move towards the regionalization of global production and trade is reinforced by the economic turmoil caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and, for Mexico, represents the possibility of moving towards the position of “producing to export”.
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