What are some specific characteristics of the economy of the Mexican free market?

Answer 1

Mexico is an "emerging market", "developing country" or "newly industrialized country" because although it is the tenth largest economy in the world (USD$2,143 billion for 2015), it has an ongoing industrialization, where agriculture activities are still important but are rapidly being outpaced by industrial (specially manufacturing) activities. This means Mexico is not fully developed, as many regions within the country have a quality of life equivalent to those of Western Europe, whereas there are other regions with education, life expectancy and economic advancement equivalent to those countries found in Sub-Saharan Africa.

For instance, the Human Development Index (HDI) is a ranking created by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) to measure countries or regions according to three basic population parameters: health, education and income. For Mexico, which is composed by 31 states and one federal district, the Federal District and Nuevo Leon had the highest HDI in 2004 (0.8837 and 0.8513, respectively), while the lowest corresponded to Chiapas (0.7185) and Oaxaca (0.7336). As a comparison, the Federal District and Nuevo Leon indexes are equivalent to those of the Czech Republic and Lithuania while Chiapas and Oaxaca correspond to those of Vietnam and Iran.

On a municipality level, this contrasts are much more dramatic: The Benito Juarez district (Federal District), the San Pedro Garza Garcia municipality (Nuevo Leon) and the San Sebastian Tula municipality (Oaxaca) have the highest HDI in Mexico (0.9509, 0.95, 0.9204, respectively) which correspond to the life quality levels of Norway, Australia and Spain. By contrast, Tehuipango (Veracruz, 0.4985), Coicoyan de las Flores(Oaxaca, 0.4768), Batopilas (Chihuahua, 0.4734) and Cochoapa el Grande (Guerrero, 0.4354) correspond to the quality of life of Madagascar, Haiti, Kenya and Benin.

Therefore, until Mexico attains certain "threshold of development" where all its people has a certain quality of life, it will continue to be considered a "developing country".