Research Network
Sustainable Global Supply Chains

#4 - Shaping sustainable supply chains

#3 - Shaping sustainable supply chains

#2 - Shaping sustainable supply chains

Four Keys to Resilient Supply Chains

India’s manufacturing and services value-chains are shifting South – A curse or a blessing?

Mandating Sustainable Governance of the Supply Chain – Complementing Old Carrots with New Sticks?

Pandemic trade: COVID‐19, remote work and global value chains

This paper studies the trade effects of COVID-19 using monthly disaggregated trade data for 28 countries and multiple trading partners from the beginning of the pandemic to June 2020. Regression results based on a sector-level gravity model show that the negative trade effects induced by COVID-19 shocks varied widely across sectors. Sectors more amenable to remote work contracted less throughout the pandemic. Importantly, participation in global value chains increased traders’ vulnerability to shocks suffered by trading partners, but it also reduced their vulnerability to domestic shocks.

How the Pandemic has Impacted the Various Layers of the Global Garment Supply Chain

This timely collection brings together original explorations of the COVID-19 pandemic and its wide-ranging, global effects on human rights. The contributors argue that a human rights perspective is necessary to understand the pervasive consequences of the crisis, while focusing attention on those being left behind and providing a necessary framework for the effort to 'build back better'. Expert contributors to this volume address interconnections between the COVID-19 crisis and human rights to equality and non-discrimination, including historical responses to pandemics, populism and authoritarianism, and the rights to health, information, water and the environment. Highlighting the dangerous potential for derogations from human rights, authors further scrutinize the human rights compliance of new legislation and policies in relation to issues such as privacy, protection of persons with disabilities, freedom of expression, and access to medicines. Acknowledging the pandemic as a defining moment for human rights, the volume proposes a post-crisis human rights agenda to engage civil society and government at all levels in concrete measures to roll back increasing inequality. With rich examples, new thinking, and provocative analyses of human rights, COVID-19, pandemics, crises, and inequality, this book will be of key interest to scholars, students, and practitioners in all areas of human rights, global governance, and public health, as well as others who are ready to embark on an exploration of these complex challenges.

Cling together, swing together: the contagious effects of COVID‐19 on developing countries through global value chains

This paper aims at estimating the economic vulnerability of developing countries to disruptions in global value chains (GVCs) due to the COVID‐19 pandemic. It uses trade in value added data for a sample of 12 developing countries in sub‐Saharan Africa, Asia and Latin America to assess their dependence on demand and supply from the three main hubs China, Europe, and North America. Using first estimates on COVID‐19‐induced changes in final demand and production, we obtain an early projection of the GDP effect during the lockdowns that runs through trade in GVCs. Our estimates reveal that adverse demand‐side effects reduce GDP up to 5.4 percent, and that collapsing foreign supply puts an even larger share of countries’ GDP at risk. Overall, we confirm conjecture that the countries most affected are those highly integrated in GVCs (South‐East Asian countries). We argue, however, that these countries also benefit from a well‐diversified portfolio of foreign suppliers and demand destinations, possibly leading to a cushioning of economic downswing because COVID‐19 stroke major hubs at different times.