INTRODUCTION

This book argues that trade policy depends on the formation and relative strength of two competing cross-cutting business-state trade policy coalitions: the protectionist coalition and the free trade coalition. In turn, a series of international and domestic-level political and economic variables associated with the external context, the business sector, and the state drive these coalition dynamics. This chapter reviews the argument and evidence presented in previous chapters, places the Mexican case into a larger comparative framework, and offers some potential theoretical and practical implications of this research. The next section provides a brief review of the basic tenets of the argument and the evidence from the Mexican case in order to tie back together the study's theoretical and empirical components and permit an assessment of its explanatory power. The third section compares Mexico with three other cases that undertook varying degrees of economic reform: Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. Some of the most successful reformers shared critical characteristics with Mexico, while those countries that lagged behind in their reform efforts often exhibited very different kinds of coalition dynamics. The fourth section raises some of the study's theoretical implications. It presents contributions that the approach developed in these pages may be able to make to the development of theory in the discipline as a whole, as well as in the subfields of international political economy and comparative politics. The chapter concludes by highlighting some of the study's practical implications for Mexico's recent past and future.