International trade resilience and the Covid-19 pandemic

Spatial evolution, influencing factors and spillover effects of logistics resilience in the Yangtze River Economic Belt

Logistics resilience is a significant representation of sustainable development ability and a necessary support for high-quality economic development. In order to explore the influencing factors and realization mechanism of the improvement of logistics resilience of the Yangtze River Economic Belt and the high-quality and sustainable development of the economy, this paper comprehensively considers factors of the supply and demand relationship of the logistics market, industrial structure and ecological environment, and evaluates the urban logistics resilience of the Yangtze River Economic Belt by using POI data and statistical data. Combined with the spatial Durbin model, the influencing factors and spatial spillover effects of inter-city logistics resilience were revealed. This study found that the urban logistics resilience in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River has been high. Except Chongqing and Shanghai, the COVID-19 epidemic happened in 2020 led to a significant decrease in logistics resilience. In the meanwhile, every 1% increase in the logistics resilience of the city will promote the logistics resilience of the adjacent cities by 0.145%. Economic condition and urban development potential have positive effects on logistics resilience of the city and its adjacent cities. The economic condition has a direct effect coefficient of 0.166 and an indirect effect coefficient of 0.181, The direct and indirect effects of urban development potential are significantly positive, and the coefficients are 0.001 and 0.006, respectively. The level of information, government support and ability of technological innovation are helpful for the improvement of urban logistics resilience while hindering the enhancement of logistics resilience in adjacent cities. The research area can be extended in the future and more influencing factors can be considered in the future.

The effects of COVID-19 on domestic and international security in democratic and authoritarian regimes

While numerous studies have examined how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected health care systems, supply chains, and economies, we do not understand how the pandemic has impacted the security of democratic and authoritarian states from a global standpoint. Thus, this study examines how COVID-19 has affected the security of democratic and authoritarian regimes. In conducting a historical, qualitative review of the security effects of the pandemic, we find that COVID-19 significantly affected domestic and international security for democratic and authoritarian states in both similar and varied ways. Additionally, the manner in which states responded to the pandemic was often conditioned by their regime type and by the nature of the governing leadership during the pandemic. These findings have important implications in considering how COVID-19 affected the security of democratic and authoritarian states, how regime type shapes government responses to infectious disease outbreaks, and how democratic and authoritarian states may respond to future pandemics.

Urban human settlements' resilience measurement and characteristics and their mechanism model in China

This study introduces the principle of resilience into the study of human settlements. In this study, a comprehensive evaluation model of urban human settlements' resilience based on the provincial region of China was constructed using the Driver-Pressure-State-Impact-Response framework. The spatio-temporal evolution characteristics of urban human settlements' resilience was explored. The influencing factors were analysed by geographical detectors, and the driving mechanism was constructed. Results show that the following. (1) The resilience level of human settlements in China continued to increase, and the resilience level of each province and city changed significantly. The overall clustering effect showed a tendency to fluctuate and weaken. The distribution of cold spot areas became less and less, and the hot spots were moving from northeast China to southeast China. (2) Significant differences existed in the intensity of the impact of different indicators on the resilience system. The value of the impact factor showed an overall upward trend, and the number of key impact factors increased. (3) Improving the ability of scientific and technological innovation, accelerating the transformation and upgrading of the regional economy, increasing the training of talents and making financial inclination in scientific and technological development and industrial pollution control were all important ways for developing and maintaining the resilience of urban human settlements. This study not only introduces a new evaluation of urban human settlements from the perspective of resilience but also explores key impact indices and driving mechanisms, which provides new ideas for studying urban human settlements.

Resilience and social change: Findings from research trends using association rule mining

This study analyzed the historical development of resilience with respect to multidisciplinary aspects using association rule mining (ARM). ARM is a rule-based machine-learning approach tailored to identify validated relations among multiple variables in a large dataset. This study collected author keywords from all resilience-related literature in the Web of Science database and examined the changes in validated resilience-related topics using ARM. We found that resilience-related research tends to diversify and expand over time. Although topics and their academic fields related to engineering and complex adaptive systems were prominent in the early 2000s, psychosocial resilience and social-ecological resilience have received significant attention in recent years. The increasing interest in resilience-related topics linked to psychological and ecological factors, as well as social system components, can be attributed to the impact of a series of complex and global events that occurred in the late 2000s. Recently, resilience has been conceived as a way of thinking, perspective, or paradigm to address emergent complexity and uncertainty with vague concepts. Resilience is increasingly being regarded as a boundary spanner that promotes communication and collaboration among stakeholders who share different interests and scientific knowledge.

Socioeconomic resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic. The role of industrial capabilities

The socioeconomic impact of COVID-19 has been widely uneven across regions and countries, reflecting underlying differences in their resilience against shocks. This paper tries to explain this heterogeneity by identifying factors of resilience and vulnerability. To fully capture the impact of the crisis on economic activity, we propose a novel index of GDP loss that measures both the initial shock and recovery rate at the country level. With a dataset of 125 countries, we implement cross-sectional regression techniques to estimate the impact of pandemic-specific and structural factors on the index. The focus of the analysis is placed on a dimension that was not sufficiently explored yet in the specialized literature: the role of industrial capabilities. Results show that industrial capabilities were crucial in supporting countries' ability to absorb and resist the global shock. The paper thus provides new empirical evidence on the role played by manufacturing industries in strengthening resilience to face unexpected events.

Urban resilience under the COVID-19 pandemic: A quantitative assessment framework based on system dynamics

The COVID-19 pandemic, which lasted for three years, has had a great impact on the public health system, society and economy of cities, revealing the insufficiency of urban resilience under large-scale public health events (PHEs). Given that a city is a networked and multidimensional system with complex interactions, it is helpful to improve urban resilience under PHEs based on system thinking. Therefore, this paper proposes a dynamic and systematic urban resilience framework that incorporates four subsystems (governance, infrastructures, socioeconomy and energy-material flows). The composite index, system dynamics and epidemic simulation model are integrated into the framework to show the nonlinear relationships in the urban system and reflect the changing trend of urban resilience under PHEs. Then, urban resilience under different epidemic scenarios and response policy scenarios is calculated and discussed to provide some suggestions for decision-makers when faced with the trade-off between the control of PHEs and the maintenance of city operation. The paper concludes that control policies could be adjusted according to the characteristics of PHEs; strict control policies under a severe epidemic could lead to a significant decrease in urban resilience, while a more flexible control strategy can be adopted under a mild epidemic scenario to ensure the normal operation of urban functions. Moreover, the critical functions and impact factors of each subsystem are identified.

Spatio-temporal heterogeneity in the international trade resilience during COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns have created immeasurable health and economic crises, leading to unprecedented disruptions to world trade. The COVID-19 pandemic shows diverse impacts on different economies that suffer and recover at different rates and degrees. This research aims to evaluate the spatio-temporal heterogeneity of international trade network vulnerabilities in the current crisis to understand the global production resilience and prepare for the future crisis. We applied a series of complex network analysis approaches to the monthly international trade networks at the world, regional, and country scales for the pre- and post- COVID-19 outbreak period. The spatio-temporal patterns indicate that countries and regions with an effective COVID-19 containment such as East Asia show the strongest resilience, especially Mainland China, followed by high-income countries with fast vaccine roll-out (e.g., U.S.), whereas low-income countries (e.g., Africa) show high vulnerability. Our results encourage a comprehensive strategy to enhance international trade resilience when facing future pandemic threats including effective non-pharmaceutical measures, timely development and rollout of vaccines, strong governance capacity, robust healthcare systems, and equality via international cooperation. The overall findings elicit the hidden global trading disruption, recovery, and growth due to the adverse impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Impact of participation in the belt and road initiative on regional economic resilience at province level

Purpose

This study aims to examine how participation in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) affects province-level regional economic resilience. In the context of dual circulation – the new development paradigm proposed by the Chinese Government – participating in the BRI is an important means of connecting both international and domestic circulations and achieving high economic resilience. The complex causal relationship between participation in the BRI and province-level regional economic resilience is investigated.

Design/methodology/approach

Based on the complex system view, this study uses fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to examine the impact on regional economic resilience when provinces participate in the BRI through unimpeded trade, infrastructure connectivity, financial integration and people-to-people bonds under the two conditions of attention allocation and buffering capacity. Qualitative textual analysis is applied to analyse provincial work reports, and relevant statistical data are used to measure the economic resilience from 2013 to 2020.

Findings

The authors identified three condition configurations that lead to a high regional economic resilience at province-level and one condition configuration that lead to no high-level regional economic resilience.

Research limitations/implications

In-depth analyses of qualitative materials should be conducted to explain the systematic relationships among the conditions.

Originality/value

This research is of practical significance to the development of the theoretical framework and practices of the BRI in the context of dual circulation.

How COVID-19 pandemic has shaped buyer-supplier relationships in engineering companies with ethical perception considerations: A multi-methodological study

In business-to-business (B2B) operations, prior studies have mainly explored transaction-based relationships with both buyers and suppliers opportunistic behaviors, driven largely by their intent to maximize their own benefits. These studies have also found that dependency on partners increases when supply materials are scarce. However, research is scant on how this relationship changes in the face of exogenous forces such as the COVID-19 pandemic, keeping in mind the ethical perception considerations. This study aims to bridge this gap in the literature by studying how buyers and sellers leverage collaboration and resource-sharing to tide over pandemic-like situations similar to the current COVID-19 pandemic while considering their ethical perceptions. We conduct a multi-methodological study consisting of an industrial survey and an interview-based thematic analysis. In the first phase, we collect primary data using a structured questionnaire and conduct a covariance-based structural equation modeling (CB-SEM) analysis. In the second phase, we conduct a post-hoc test. We find that non-regular suppliers will share strategic resources with buyers during uncertain times (e.g. COVID-19 pandemic) if they have a high ethical perception of the buying firm and share a candid relationship despite being their irregular customers. Our findings propose that B2B firms should maintain healthy relationships with alternative suppliers to build trust and avoid supply crises in times of disruptions.

Can the establishment of national sanitary cities better resist the impact of COVID-19?

The global spread of COVID-19 has led to profound reflection on building a global public health security system. This paper uses the urban data collected during the COVID-19 epidemic in China in 2020 to evaluate the effect of the National Sanitary City (NSC) policy on the prevention and control of that epidemic at different stages. We found that the NSC policy was able to curb the occurrence and transmission of the epidemic the epidemic effectively after controlling a series of factors such as urban characteristics, population mobility and pathogen transmission. Compared with non-NSCs, the NSCs were better able to control the number of infected people and the infection rate and transmission rate, and this performance was even more impressive when the epidemic gradually entered the sporadic distribution stage. The heterogeneity analysis shows that the impact of the NSC policy on the prevention and control of COVID-19 differs according to the economic development level and population size. To a certain extent, the NSC policy has blocked the spread of viruses by continuously improving the urban medical and health system and strengthening the publicity concerning infectious disease prevention and control knowledge.

Assessment of regional economic restorability under the stress of COVID-19 using the new interval type-2 fuzzy ORESTE method

The economic implications from the COVID-19 crisis are not like anything people have ever experienced. As predictions indicated, it is not until the year 2025 may the global economy recover to the ideal situation as it was in 2020. Regions lacked of developing category is among the mostly affected regions, because the category includes weakly and averagely potential power. For supporting the decision of economic system recovery scientifically and accurately under the stress of COVID-19, one feasible solution is to assess the regional economic restorability by taking into account a variety of indicators, such as development foundation, industrial structure, labor forces, financial support and government's ability. This is a typical multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem with quantitative and qualitative criteria/indicator. To solve this problem, in this paper, an investigation is conducted to obtain 14 indicators affecting regional economic restorability, which form an indicator system. The interval type-2 fuzzy set (IT2FS) is an effective tool to express experts' subjective preference values (PVs) in the process of decision-making. First, some formulas are developed to convert quantitative PVs to IT2FSs. Second, an improved interval type-2 fuzzy ORESTE (IT2F-ORESTE) method based on distance and likelihood are developed to assess the regional economic restorability. Third, a case study is given to illustrate the method. Then, robust ranking results are acquired by performing a sensitivity analysis. Finally, some comparative analyses with other methods are conducted to demonstrate that the developed IT2F-ORESTE method can supporting the decision of economic system recovery scientifically and accurately.

E-Commerce Policy and International Business

The rise of digitization and information and communication technologies (ICT) is playing a vital role in facilitating global trade and business activities and in overcoming cross-border transaction costs. In so doing, it offers firms significant benefits and opportunities to compete on a global scale, as witnessed during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The growth and widespread diffusion of internet-enabled technologies and platforms have created numerous opportunities for firms to provide products and services across both developed and developing markets. Yet, limited research has been conducted in the international business domain to explore the rise of ecommerce and its implications for international business scholarship. In this focused issue, we present an examination of the role played by e-commerce in international business, paying particular attention to the policy aspect of e-commerce and issuing a call for a greater integration of e-commerce policy in international business research.

Making the EU cohesion policy work to support exports at time of Covid-19: Evidence on the Italian regions

This study investigates regional trade resilience and the role of the EU cohesion policy to support exports during the first wave of the Covid-19 crisis. We compare regional export resilience during the pandemic shock and the Great Recession in order to find possible similar patterns. We also use panel estimates obtained for the years of the Great Recession to construct regional trade adjustment scenarios at time of Covid-19. Our results suggest that the main adverse consequences of the first wave of the pandemic crisis on regional exports are localised in the regions that show high integration in international global value chains, and high exposure to tourism activities. We also find that the drop in regional exports observed during the first wave of the Covid-19 shock can be limited if more EU funds are timely transferred to beneficiaries. We develop different trade adjustment scenarios to account for heterogeneity among the Italian regions and specific characteristics of the Covid-19 crisis. The main policy implications of our study are finally discussed.

Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on household financial asset allocation: A China population study

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Chinese government implemented a “dynamic zero” epidemic prevention policy, which led to an increase in the likelihood of business shutdowns, increased uncertainty about people's income, and changes in people's psychological expectations, which in turn influenced their behavioral choices. This study aims to understand the impact of COVID-19 and other major public health emergencies on household financial asset allocation. To do so, we conducted an online survey of 712 people in China to measure household financial asset allocation behavior during three different time periods: pre-pandemic, mid-pandemic, and post-pandemic. At the same time, we analyzed the impact of sociodemographic characteristics on risk attitudes and the differences in household asset allocation decisions at different pre-pandemic time points among people with different risk attitudes. The results show that household financial asset allocation changed significantly before, during, and after the pandemic, and residents' precautionary savings increased. In addition, gender, education level, occupation, and annual income have significant effects on risk preferences. The pandemic leads to increased uncertainty in economic and social development, people's psychological expectations of economic development play an important role in household financial asset allocation.

Resilience and Systems—A Review

This paper presents, from a systems orientation, a review of the resilience literature since its emergence as an ecological concept in academic parlance in 1973. It argues that much of the resilience literature covers existing ground in that existing engineering systems stability ideas are being reinvented. The review follows modern control systems theory as the comparison framework, where each system, irrespective of its disciplinary association, is represented in terms of inputs, state, and outputs. Modern control systems theory is adopted because of its cohesiveness and universality. The review reveals that resilience can be thought of in terms of adaptive systems and adaptation, where the system has the ability to respond to perturbations and changes through passive and active feedback mechanisms—returning the system state or system form to a starting position or transitioning to another suitable state or form. This systematic and cross-disciplinary review offers the potential for a greater understanding of resilience and the elimination of overlap in the literature, particularly related to terminology.

Investigating the Impact of Resilience, Responsiveness, and Quality on Customer Loyalty of MSMEs: Empirical Evidence

Due to the importance of the micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) sector and the negative implications of COVID-19, which resulted in decreasing resource availability, shortages of supply, declining consumer demand and requirements, and a lack of consumer satisfaction and loyalty, this research investigates the impact of resilience, responsiveness, and quality on customer loyalty in MSMEs. An online questionnaire was conducted on MSMEs’ end consumers in the Egyptian context. The analysis was conducted through Amos and SPSS, and the research hypotheses were tested through covariance-based structural equation modelling for 891 valid questionnaires. The findings exposed that there is a positive significant impact for operational resilience (flexibility and technology adoption), responsiveness (delivery fulfillment and speed and after-sale service), and product/service quality on customer loyalty in terms of behavioral, attitudinal dimensions. It contributes to understanding how MSMEs could enhance their sustainable performance (resilience, responsiveness, quality) to reach better customer loyalty. This research presents insights on how the MSMEs sector can adapt to the dynamic business environment in terms of COVID-19 crisis and consumer behavior, which has changed the nature and needs of the market and consumers. In addition, this research extends the theories of Resource-Based View (RBV), Dynamic Capability View (DCV), and Theory of Consumption Value (TCV) in an empirical contribution through filling the gap in understanding consumers’ needs in terms of resilience, responsiveness, and quality.

Disentangling the multifaceted effects of supply base complexity on supply chain agility and resilience

Purpose

The study investigates how supply base structural complexity influences both supply chain agility and resilience. It employs Normal Accident Theory and Portfolio Theory to disentangle the effects of three structural facets of complexity – numerousness; technical and functional diversity; geographical distribution of suppliers – on the two capabilities simultaneously.

Design/methodology/approach

The study is grounded in the Italian footwear industry. 31 manufacturing firms with their global supply base have provided a cross-sectional time series database over a 10-year period (310 observations).

Findings

The results show that supply base numerousness has nonlinear effects on both supply chain agility and resilience. The directions of these effects are opposites. They also show that supply base diversity has an inverted U-shaped effect on supply chain agility while it is insignificant for resilience. Finally, the results show that suppliers' geographical dispersion is detrimental to both capabilities.

Originality/value

This is the first study that considers the multifaceted effects of supply base complexity on both supply chain agility and resilience. In doing so, it also sheds light on some of the most common trade-offs that firms address when they seek a balance between different strategies, such as increasing agility without damaging supply base resilience and vice versa. Considering the resource constraints firms normally face, by disentangling the dual effects of each complexity facet, this study helps decision-makers to develop scalability and leverage the supply base characteristics in order to survive and prosper in uncertain markets.

Multi-tier analysis of the medical equipment supply chain network: empirical analysis and simulation of a major rupture

Purpose

While a global supply network can provide stability to address localized interruptions, however, the recent global pandemic materialized many concerns and risks associated with the global supply network. Considering the short-term and long-term effects of changes in the global supply chain, this research explores how the location characteristics of the firms across the supply chain affect their performance.

Design/methodology/approach

Using the mined data from five tiers of the backward supply chain of medical equipment, the authors constructed a large supply chain network consisting of close to 160,000 dyadic connections. The authors used various network centrality and clustering algorithms to measure the influence of each firm across the supply chain structure. Furthermore, the authors ran a scenario to simulate the elimination of Chinese firms from the global supply chain and recalculated all centralities. Regression analysis was used to measure the effect of supply chain network centralities on firms' performance across the supply chain with and without Chinese firms.

Findings

The complexity of global purchasing across global tiers of supply networks had been recognized as a source of uncertainty before the COVID-19 pandemic. This pandemic was the black swan that the medical supply chain professionals had noted its threat in recent years. While a global supply network can provide stability to address localized interruptions, however, the recent global pandemic materialized many concerns and risks associated with the global supply network. Considering the short-term and long-term effects of changes in the global supply chain, this research explores how the location characteristics of the firms across the supply chain affect their performance.

Research limitations/implications

This research has three main implications. First, it provides a benchmark for manufacturing firms and distributors around the world operating in the post-COVID-19 business environment to better understand the relationship of their supply chain strategy and firms' financial performance. Second, investors and asset managers can evaluate their portfolios in light of the changing relationship as a result of possible protectionism initiatives. Finally, policymakers can apply the research methodology of this work in various industries while reevaluating post-COVID-19 international relations and trades policies at the firm, industry and country levels.

Practical implications

Policymakers working on global connection can utilize the outcome of this research to explore the consequences of local and global policies on trade patterns, organizational performance as well as individuals' movements. Another implication of this study for policymakers is that it provides a powerful simulation and analytical tool to launch or combat the global ruptures, including trade wars and natural disasters stemming from natural events (e.g. climate change) and human-made events (e.g. wars, supply-chain interruptions, sanctions).

Originality/value

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first large-scale empirical study that measures the effect of supply chain structure across multiple (five) tiers of the global supply chain on firms' performance. The present study uses the original supply chain network data mined by the authors from financial publications.

COVID-19's Impact on International Trade

We analyze how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the trade of products between countries. With this aim, using the United Nations Comtrade database, we perform a Google matrix analysis of the multiproduct World Trade Network (WTN) for the years 2018-2020, comprising the emergence of the COVID-19 as a global pandemic. The applied algorithms-PageRank, CheiRank and the reduced Google matrix-take into account the multiplicity of the WTN links, providing new insights into international trade compared to the usual import-export analysis. These complex networks analysis algorithms establish new rankings and trade balances of countries and products considering all countries on equal grounds, independent of their wealth, and every product on the basis of its relative exchanged volumes. In comparison with the pre-COVID-19 period, significant changes in these metrics occurred for the year 2020, highlighting a major rewiring of the international trade flows induced by the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. We define a new PageRank-CheiRank product trade balance, either export or import-oriented, which is significantly perturbed by the pandemic.

The transformation of global value chains in the age of Covid-19 and Digitization

Almost everyone on the globe had to adjust to new conditions as a result of Covid-19 in conjunction with digitization. Contact and entry limitations damaged global business, trade and social connections. In addition, there is an increasing impact of digitization in supply chain. Regarding these disruptions current publications emphasize that global value chains are transforming to become more resilient. This study analyzes potential factors that might increase resilience in such a dynamic environment. The research is based on a quantitative empirical study to test the formulated hypotheses. The research questions were investigated trough a survey with logistics professionals. Two hypotheses were established as significant throughout the study. These are the robustness and responsiveness of global value chains, which have a substantial impact on their resilience. Both are determined direct or indirect by digital technologies. The complexity of global value chains had no discernible effect on the resilience of the system. A structural equation model is used to analyze the data's processing. This is achieved via a hypothesis model. As a result, major implications on global value chains' resilience can be found.