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Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is often identified as a driver of economic growth, although there is no consensus on this topic in the international empirical evidence regarding its effect on labor productivity. This document analyzes the effects of Foreign Direct Investment on labor productivity in the manufacturing sector in Mexico during the 2007-2015 period by using panel data and federative entities as unit of analysis. The estimates are calculated by the generalized method of moments, which allows to consider for possible endogeneity problems. The results indicate a positive and statistically significant effect of FDI as a proportion of manufacturing GDP on the growth rate of labor productivity when the latter is estimated with the Manufacturing Labor Productivity Index published by INEGI. Similar results are found if growth in labor productivity is estimated by using manufacturing GDP per worker, although the latter have less statistical power in some specifications.

This study decomposes both the labor productivity gap and the labor productivity growth into the contributions of technical efficiency, capital deepening and technological change for Mexican manufacturing at the regional level. In order to do so, we apply a methodology that combines two literatures: the nonparametric construction of production frontiers and the general decomposition approach developed by Shorrocks (2012) which is based on the Shapley value. The results indicate that regional differences in labor productivity are mainly attributed to technical efficiency, and, to a lesser extent, to regional differences in capital deepening. Moreover, labor productivity growth was not homogeneous across regions over the period 1998-2008. In both the north and the south, the increase in labor productivity was mainly driven by technical efficiency, while technological change was the most influential factor on labor productivity growth in the central regions.