Displaying items by tag: Regional Industrial Development

Session 5: Mining and Economic Growth

Session 4: Market integration and trade

Session 3: Regional manufacturing and industrial policy 2

Session 1: Regional manufacturing and industrial policy 1

Session 8: Agricultural value chains in the region

Paper to follow

Session 7: Minerals value chains: Upstream and beneficiation

Copper, as Zambia's economic mainstay, is a mineral whose value chain stretches beyond the country's Copperbelt Province and the recently acclaimed “New Copperbelt” Northwestern Province. The Copperbelt Province as the mining hub has several industries benefiting from both upward and downward linkages in the Sub-Saharan African market and other regions globally. Despite the challenges associated with mining and mining economies being real, Zambia needs to learn from countries within the Southern African region such as South Africa and those in other continents such as Chile in order to have a formidable escape strategy from the “natural resource-curse phenomenon”. With such a strategy, stronger industrial linkages at home as well as improved contribution to regional industrialization are possible. Ultimately, this can strengthen economic growth and usher the country into a stage where beneficiation from the mines go beyond the local value chain debate but the entire nation as people see the tangible fruits of economic growth positively impacting human development indicators. The reality in the economic indicators would then truly reflect the reality on the ground among ordinary Zambians as is the case in Chile. 

This document has the objective to determine and to analyze the economic vocation of the ten main cities in Mexico, it with the purpose to identify areas of opportunity for the implementation of policies of industrial clusters as a measure to increase the productivity in the country.

From the decade of the years 90, Mexico has been involve in an intensive process of commercial liberalization, at the moment has signed 11 commercial agreements with the participation of 43 countries of the world.

Nevertheless the competitiveness has not been reflected with the same intensity in the productive activity and it register an backwardness in the international context, this way while in the year 2003 the country was placed as the number 47 as regards competitiveness, for the year 2007 fell two places and it was located as the 49 in the world.

In this sense the necessity to implement actions that allow to face the globalization phenomenon with a low competitiveness is an urgent task. In Mexico diverse initiatives have been undertaken to consolidates industrial clusters as in the case of the entities like Baja California (wine), Coahuila (automotive), Guanajuato (footwear), Jalisco (electronics) and Queretaro (information technology) with some significant advances.

The industrial clusters, today, represent a strategy to promote the development of an economy in a context of international competition which is based on the coordinating actions of the diverse actors related a specific activity. In Mexico, of the ten most important population centers, five register high levels of competitiveness (Mexico City, León, Coahuila, Baja California and Chihuahua), three a medium level (Jalisco, State of Mexico and Guanajuato) and the rest (San Luis Potosí and Puebla) register a low level of competitiveness. San Luis Potosi, for example, represents an opportunity area to promote actions of industrial cluster in three activities: metal-mechanics, automotive and food industry.

CV

Juan Carlos Neri Guzman was born on 14 October of 1964 in the México City, He is an economist and has made studies for Master Degree in Regional Development, Now he is a professor , researcher in the Polithecnic University of San Luis Potosi where take a doctorate studies with the ORGMASZ Institute of Poland.

His particular expertise fields are the planeation, quality systems, local development, statistical analysis, information systems, evaluating of public politics and the economic topics.

His previous experience was in government in the Planeation Secretary, (1998 to 2003); Environmental Development Secretary (1997) and Technique Secretary (1988 to 1992).

In September 2000, the SADC FTA has been launched wherein full liberalization of trade is expected by 2012. The SADC FTA is intended to act as a catalyst for increased regional integration. Nevertheless what are the benefits expected from the SADC FTA given the economic structure disparities existing among its participating members? Is it really feasible to expand intra-SADC trade? To address the potential of increasing intra SADC trade we present and analyze three complementary approaches. The first two ones refer to trade indices: export diversification indices, revealed comparative advantages and trade complementarity indices, and the last one is based on gravity model. Given that SADC countries have concentrated and similar comparative advantages, our static analysis suggests that the room for further trade within SADC is limited. Nevertheless, some results and ongoing researches show that development of intra industry trade might have trade creation effects in the region.