Mexico's World Trade and Free Trade Agreement Negotiations: Economic Integration, Global Value Chains and Strategic Challenges Under North American Regionalism

Mexico’s trade strategy sits at the intersection of global openness, regional dependence and institutional renegotiation. This article examines how Mexico’s world trade profile and free trade agreement negotiations have evolved from broad liberalisation to a more complex framework centred on the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), global value chains and nearshoring. It asks, first, how Mexico’s dense agreement network has shaped trade structure, foreign direct investment and value-chain participation and, secondly, what strategic constraints arise from the renewed centrality of North American regionalism. The study combines documentary analysis, comparative trade-policy analysis, descriptive statistics and historical-institutional interpretation using sources from the World Trade Organization, World Bank, OECD, UNCTAD, INEGI, Bank of Mexico, Ministry of Economy of Mexico and United States trade authorities. The article finds that Mexico’s trade model remains highly successful in export generation and manufacturing integration, but that value capture, diversification and institutional bargaining space remain constrained by strong dependence on the United States market, stricter rules of origin, labour and environmental enforcement, infrastructure bottlenecks and regulatory uncertainty. The conclusion is that USMCA is simultaneously Mexico’s principal strategic asset and its main source of concentration risk, which implies that trade policy must be linked to industrial upgrading, logistics, energy reliability, skills formation and a more proactive diversification strategy.