If you've been following the development of this story at all, you may be wondering: What does it mean for the United States if one Mexican candidate wins, as opposed to another?

Of course the answer depends on you own political and economic leanings, but I'll try to sketch out the differences between the main candidates, one of whom will be the president-elect of the Republic of Mexico after Sunday's vote.

Felipe Calderon
The nominee of the National Action Party (Partido Accion Nacional) or PAN, has consistently supported more open markets and freer trade for Mexico during the campaign. The country has traditionally been highly protectionist, defending domestic industries and farm products against competitors worldwide.

Calderon has been telling his countrymen and women that continuing the defense of Mexican industry and agriculture from outsiders will be disastrous, and that the country has already lost out significantly in the worldwide economic race to India and China.

So the former energy minister proposes the encouragement of investors worldwide to buy into the Mexican economy. He wants to rev up the country's tourist industry, seeing it as an underperformer despite the worldwide reputation of resort cities like Cancun, Cozumel, and Acapulco.

Right now the country's government-owned petroleum giant, Pemex, is by law barred from taking on outside investors. The worldwide oil business can be hired as a contractor to supply services and equipment, but can't buy into Pemex. Historically, it's been a point of national pride that the oil giant belongs to the people of Mexico, since President Lazaro Cardenas shocked America's oil giants by seizing some of the largest oil reserves in the world.

But the national oil company has too many workers for the amount of oil it produces, and lack of investment has gradually reduced the yield from Pemex's fields. Calderon's answer, more investment from the rest of the world, is quite different from that of his principal rival, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador
The nominee of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (Partido de la Revolucion Democratica) or PRD, wants to keep Pemex in Mexican hands. He cites Lazaro Cardenas, the man who nationalized the oil, as one of his political heroes in his stump speeches.

Lopez Obrador thinks its better for Mexico to become a producer of more oil-based products instead of merely a resource extractor. Though Mexico is one of the largest oil producers in the world, and the second largest supplier to the United States, the country imports much of its gasoline, lubricants and other petroleum-derived products.

The differences with his main opponent don't end there: Lopez Obrador, or as many supporters call him, AMLO, wants to renegotiate the sections of NAFTA having to do with the continued opening of the Mexican market to American corn and beans. These traditional staples of the Mexican farmer are already hard pressed to compete with the American product with the market in transition. Mexican farms are smaller, less mechanized, and make less use of expensive bio-engineered seed. One by-product of NAFTA was to break up the egidos, the communal farmlands that produced a lot of Mexican corn. The breakup happened as the government reduced price supports for corn, and American crops poured into the Mexican market to replace the lower yields.

Drawing much of his political support from the poor, and from more agriculture-dependent southerners, Lopez Obrador has promised support for the Mexican farmer, which can only aggravate the relationship with the United States. The U.S. government would go to bat for American farmers, and fight Mexican price supports.

Like Felipe Calderon, Lopez Obrador sees a future winner in the tourist industry, and wants to increase both international investment and government support for its continued development.

The controversies
Throughout the campaign season the PAN candidate has pounded away at his PRD rival in speeches and in aggressive national advertising. Calderon has called Lopez Obrador's economic policies a danger to Mexico, and has compared AMLO to some of the hemispheres most left wing leaders -- like Evo Morales of Bolivia, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, and the old man of the Latin left, Fidel Castro of Cuba.

American-born pollster Dan Lund says Lopez Obrador is without a doubt a man of the left, but much more in the mold of European Social Democrats, and could be more accurately compared with recently elected Michelle Bachelet of Chile, and Nestor Kirchner of Argentina. Like those just mentioned, Lopez Obrador sees more of a role for the government in the Mexican economy and the daily life of the nation than Felipe Calderon. The Calderon campaign, and its free-marketeering PAN economic advisers want to continue to whittle away at the traditionally big Mexican state. The PAN candidate has been telling the country that he is the safer choice, pledging to continue the Vicente Fox policies that have brought stability to the Mexican peso, to interest rates, and government borrowing.

The Lopez Obrador campaign has in turn promised to live within its means, paying for expanded government spending on education, health, and infrastructure by cutting some government employment, ending subsidies to some private businesses, and by making sure the richest Mexicans pay the taxes current law requires them to pay. There is agreement from left to right that tax collection is lax, and that government would be able to do a lot more with a higher percentage of taxes owed really making it into federal coffers.

Now what?
The last trading day before the election on the Mexican stock exchange the market was steady, and slightly up for the day and the week. It would appear that the market has already factored in a possible Lopez Obrador victory. There was a swoon in the major stock index in the spring, when it began to appear that the PRD could win.

The peso was steady, and bonds weakened when the final polls revealed the left win candidate had held his lead going into the last week of campaigning. It's a small lead, 3 percent, within the margin of error. Analysts for Barclay's and the Royal Bank of Scotland said the stock market and the currency would not tank if Lopez Obrador wins a modest victory on Sunday.

Both said that if the former mayor of Mexico City, who raised old age pensions and increased spending on public transportation comes to run the whole country with a strong electoral mandate, there will suddenly be a better chance that he'll be able to get his programs through. And if that happens, capitalists in Mexico and around the world will react.

Think tank leader Luis Rubio told me the other day that the reason Lopez Obrador was leading the presidential race was that he was the only candidate who had successfully diagnosed Mexico's economic problems and talked openly about the tremendous gap between rich and poor here.

The only problem, Rubio continued, was that his proposal to cure those ills would not work, and could possibly make things worse. By contrast, Rubio said, Calderon had never indicated that he understood the full scope of the country's social and economic problems. But in Rubio's opinion, Calderon's ideas were less likely to do harm, and might even work to address the problems of the poor.

I asked if it was possible for the two work together?

Not only possible, he said ... necessary.

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