Is Mexico sewing up development? NAFTA and the North American apparel industry

Since the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Mexico has become the largest exporter of apparel to the U.S. market. A commodity chains approach is used to analyze the inter-firm networks that are the organizational infrastructure of this recent export dynamism. Primary data for this study was gathered over the course of more than one hundred interviews with managers of textile and apparel companies in the United States and Mexico, as well as retailers, industry association representatives, labor organizations, and federal and state officials in Mexico. Secondary sources include academic and industry publications and trade data.; A comparison of pre- and post-NAFTA network structures in the North American apparel industry reveals that a form of more integrated apparel production known as full-package has emerged in recent years that affords better development outcomes than those associated with the maquila model of assembly manufacturing. Specifically post-NAFTA networks between Mexican manufacturers and U.S. buyers generate new opportunities for industrial upgrading at the industry, firm and plant levels in the Mexican textile-apparel complex.; However, the claim that the benefits created by Mexico's post-NAFTA export dynamism are uneven across the Mexican landscape is supported with evidence from case studies of apparel-producing clusters in Torreon, Aguascalientes, and Morelos, Mexico. It is argued that in order to account for the variation in development outcomes across space, a focus on the organizational dynamics of global industries must be complemented by a grounded analysis of the institutional environments within which particular global-local links are forged. Particular attention is paid to the way in which the governance structures of post-NAFTA networks between foreign and Mexican firms reflect and reproduce the asymmetrical power relations of the larger structures that demarcate the global from the local. When commodity chains are understood as concrete social and economic relationships that reflect the particular contexts in which they are embedded, they illuminate the dynamics of contemporary development, and reveal both the opportunities and constraints that participation in cross-border trade and production networks poses for exporting firms in developing countries.