Discusión: Policy Implications and Strategic Upgrading Ecosystems
The scholarly synthesis demonstrates that institutional renegotiation under North American trade frameworks creates profound spatial and structural divergence across manufacturing regions. While regional integration under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement seeks to anchor nearshoring investments and restructure supply chains, domestic industrial networks face recurrent vulnerability due to institutional renegotiation provisions (Mexico's World Trade and Free Trade Agreement Negotiations: Economic Integration, Global Value Chains and Strategic Challenges Under North American Regionalism, 2026). In particular, periodic institutional review mechanisms introduce structural uncertainty that disrupts long-term capital commitments across subnational manufacturing hubs (The USMCA sunset clause, 2022). Although standard trade literature assumes broad spillovers from foreign direct investment, supplier upgrading depends critically on domestic ecosystem configurations and localized capability development (An Ecosystem View of Supplier Upgrading in Global Value Chains: Evidence from Taiwanese Suppliers, 2023). A critical research gap remains regarding how subnational institutional capacities interact with localized supplier ecosystems to mediate these trade review shocks. Existing scholarship frequently prioritizes macroeconomic trade volumes over territorial variation in value addition and technological integration. Consequently, lower-tier domestic suppliers in peripheral regions remain vulnerable to assembly-oriented lock-in. A key limitation of this discussion stems from the evolving nature of the trade framework review timeline and the scarcity of uniform subnational data tracking domestic component linkages. Future research must address these limitations by examining firm-level absorptive capacity across heterogeneous industrial clusters under conditions of recurring institutional reassessment.