In the late 1980s, Mexico opened itself to international trade and foreign investment, followed in the early 1990s by China. China and Mexico are still the two countries characterized as middle-income by the World Bank with the highest levels of merchandise exports. Although their measures of openness have been comparable, these two countries have had sharply different economic performances: China has achieved spectacular growth, whereas Mexico’s growth has been disappointingly modest. In this article, we extend the analysis of Kehoe and Ruhl (2010) to account for the differences in these experiences. We show that China opened its economy while it was still achieving rapid growth from shifting employment out of agriculture and into manufacturing while Mexico opened long after its comparable phase of structural transformation. China is only now catching up with Mexico in terms of GDP per working-age person, and it still lags behind in terms of the fraction of its population engaged in agriculture. Furthermore, we argue that China has been able to move up a ladder of quality and technological sophistication in the composition of its exports and production, while Mexico seems to be stuck exporting a fixed set of products to its North American neighbors.

We study how service trade affects structural transformation and regional patterns of specialization. Using unique Canadian trade data, we document that i) interprovincial and international trade of services have increased between 1992-2017; ii) inter-provincial trade is larger in services compared to goods; iii) structural transformation occurs from goods to tradable services, especially in tradable service-intensive provinces; and iv) there is significant regional specialization in producing goods and services across provinces. Using a spatial model of structural transformation and trade, we quantify the effects of service trade, domestic and international, on the share of the tradable-service sector and regional specialization. Our results indicate that domestic service trade has significantly contributed to the regional specialization. On the other hand, we find that, international service trade is more responsible for the increase of the tradable service share than domestic service trade in the aggregate Canadian economy.