NAFTA, Industrial Concentration, Employment Volatility, Wages, and Internal and International Mexican Migration: 1990–2009

Since the late 1980s, Mexico has launched an extensive process of economic liberalization that culminated with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. Since then, Mexico’s economy has been issuing in a constant fl ow of international trade. During this process, the internal structure of the economy has altered patterns in terms of the composition, size, and geographic location of economic activities. Consequently, employment and wages are among the economic factors that have been affected. These in turn have direct but different infl uences on regional socioeconomic development. These coinciding events of liberalization, changing wages for Mexican workers, and internal and external migration have had critical consequences for Mexico’s economy and development. We are interested in the changes in wages and internal and external Mexican migration for the past two decades. On the one hand, the evidence indicates that, in the years after NAFTA was enacted, the number of Mexican-born people living in the U.S. has increased considerably and that most of them have crossed the border illegally. In 2000 the estimated Mexican-born population residing in the United States was about 10% of