Production Chains: Spinal Cord of Mexico’s Industrial Clusters

On these current days, the world’s economic map is dominated by clusters or economic groupings, present in almost all geographical levels, which have demonstrated to be critical masses with an unusual success on specific fields. Such clusters are groupings of firms and related institutions that compete, and at the same time cooperate. In this new context of economic activity organization, industrial groupings (clusters) are fundamental, and their performance has become a key factor for cities’, regions’ and nations’ competitive advantages. In this paper, I analyze and implement a methodology that identifies benchmark clusters, useful for applied regional based economic studies. The approach addressed here, applied to the Mexican economy, is based on Feser and Bergman’s methodology, and an extension due to Rey and Mattheis.