E-Government and E-Commerce in Mexico

Following our discussion in class, I decided to focus on e-government for this post. In order to create an e-commerce friendly legal environment, the Mexican government took steps in the late 1990s to adapt existing laws related to e-commerce. Notably, in 1998, laws were introduced that allowed for electronic submission of tax returns. Other reforms included giving electronic documents, signatures, and written consents full legal recognition. The primary effort at making government services and information available electronically AND providing nationwide access to that information, “E-Mexico”, was initiated by President Vicente Fox’s administration with an implementation date of March 2001. Cortes explains that with the project,

“the government plans to implement a network with all regions of the country,…to help to modernize public administration. Therefore, it will allow access to information by all the population. This project objective is to implement by the year 2006 a national Network for the 2447 municipalities, in order to serve nearly 60 million Mexicans (2002; 6).”

The infrastructure has been growing over the past two decades, and Palacios makes the claim that along with a basic regulatory framework, “a reasonably adequate IT infrastructure exists in Mexico for e-commerce to take hold and develop in this country (2003, 73)”:

• The Internet in Mexico was born in 1987. Aside from the primary domain “.mx”, there were no subdomains until 1992. By 2001, there were nearly 74,000 subdomains, with the subdomain “com.mx” used by commercial users comprising over 67,000 of that total.
• The number of Internet users has increased from 39,000 in 1994 to over 2.7 million in 2000.
• Mobile phone use has grown from 64,000 in 1990 to 21.7 million in 2001.
• Mexico has the highest number of Internet hosts per 1,000 inhabitants in Latin America, at 4.16 in 1999.

Palacios, 2003, p. 74, Table 7

While there are domestic companies who have contributed to growing e-commerce in Mexico, one of the largest promoters has been Microsoft and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Their efforts have included “providing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with digital technologies at low cost for engaging in e-commerce (Palacios, 74).” This is a substantial effort, given that within the services sector, which accounts for two-thirds of GDP, small businesses with 15 or fewer employees comprise 98% of all enterprises (Palacios, 72). That figure also provides an indicator for why e-commerce has not spread more quickly within Mexico, as smaller businesses tend to lack the resources to invest in information technology. As a side note, there are some people in Mexico who are concerned that the level of participation from Microsoft could lead to a national dependency upon that company (Cortes, 2002).

References

Cortes, J. (2002). New government of change in Mexico: a new information policy? Paper presented at the 68th IFLA Council and General Conference.

Palacios, J. J. (2003). The Development of E-Commerce in Mexico: A Business-Led Passing Boom or a Step Toward the Emergence of a Digital Economy? The Information Society: An International Journal, 19(1), 69 - 79.

Reflection on the weekend

It's been nice to work with my group in person, although hashing out our research question and figuring out how to divide up the work took much more time than I thought. And about halfway through our group discussion, I realized that I'd been trying to shoehorn my true interest (content and collections, specifically data harvesting initiatives and making content accessible) into our topic, which was supposed to be about how in the digital age, the blurring of institutional boundaries is both created by and impacts users. I would argue that the efforts to harvest data and present it globally on the Web fits into this topic well. Fortunately, we were able to narrow our scope significantly, and will be doing two case studies and a literature review about collaboration between various types of institutions, such as museums, libraries, archives, schools, and so forth.

I struggle in class with finding a way to voice my opinions without being offended by others in the class who may be quite opinionated. My concern is that if I don't speak up, my silence could be assumed to be agreement, which it may not be. Some of our discussion focused on whether the West is trying to project its values onto developing nations in seeking to design policy for bringing about knowledge societies. The materialism of the West was criticized as a product of capitalism, with capitalism as the culprit behind the current economic recession. I think that it's the freedom of expression and emphasis on human rights that allow for capitalism and democracy, and that both of these are the means for individuals to reach their full potential in a knowledge society.

I'm taking a class this spring with another Overland Park cohort, and I've found this cohort to be much friendlier and welcoming to non-cohort folks. It probably helps that this class is smaller, so discussion is more comfortable and less likely to be dominated by one or two people.