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reallocation in the Mexican services sector to the level we see in the manufacturing sector
could raise GDP by US$34.2 billion.
To investigate more deeply the factors
that drive misallocation, we examine the relationship
between firm size and management using several observable measures of frictions. First, we
use insights from the trade literature and look at the role of market size. For manufacturing,
proximity to the US (as measured by drive time between our Mexican firms and the US
border) is likely to matter most. We found that for manufacturing firms (especially in export-
exposed industries), the size-management relationship was particularly
strong when this
proximity was high. By contrast, for Mexican manufacturing plants in less export-exposed
industries, there was a weaker effect of proximity, and for services firms, there was no effect.
Instead, for Mexican service firms we found that local market competition mattered.
Metropolitan areas with larger markets had a strong size-management relationship for service
firms, but did not for manufacturers who tend to sell their goods beyond the limits of the
local metropolitan area (i.e., nationally or internationally). Finally, we turned to institutional
factors and found that the size-management relationship was
weaker in areas with low
contract enforcement, high perceived corruption and/or high crime.
These results imply that competitive and regulatory reforms in Mexico and other middle-
income countries could have important effects
on raising productivity, allocation, and
material wellbeing. Making US market access worse through increasing border frictions, by
contrast,
will damage management, productivity, and wellbeing.
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