Upcoming Events
Summer Speaker Series - Mason Online Pandemic Modeling Forum
Jun 26, 2020, 3:00 - 4:30 PM
Global Supply Chains in the Pandemic - Zhen Huo, Assistant Professor Economics Department Yale University
We study the role of global supply chains in the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on GDP growth for 64 countries. We discipline the labor supply shock across sectors and countries using the fraction of work in the sector that can be done from home, interacted with the stringency with which countries imposed lockdown measures. Using the quantitative framework and methods developed in Huo, Levchenko, and Pandalai-Nayar (2020), we show that the average real GDP downturn due to the Covid-19 shock is expected to be −31.5%, of which −10.7% (or one-third of the total) is due to transmission through global supply chains. However, “renationalization” of global supply chains does not in general make countries more resilient to pandemic-induced contractions in labor supply. The average GDP drop would have been −32.3% in a world without trade in inputs and final goods. This is because eliminating reliance on foreign inputs increases reliance on the domestic inputs, which are also subject to lockdowns. Whether renationalizing supply chains insulates a country from the pandemic depends on whether it plans to impose a more or less stringent lockdown than its trading partners. Finally, unilateral lifting of the lockdowns in the largest economies can contribute as much as 6-8% to GDP growth in some of their smaller trade partners.
Andrei A. Levchenko, Professor, Economics
University of Michigan
Zhen Huo
Assistant Professor
Economics Department
Yale University
Nitya Pandalai-Nayar, Assistant Professor
Department of Economics
University of Texas at Austin
Barthélémy Bonadio, PhD Student
Economics
University of Michigan
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