Assessing the importance of risky products in international trade and global value chains

The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown the world's economy and trade into disarray, putting international reliance in the limelight. This sparked debate on the durability and resilience of global value chains. In this paper, we construct a ‘product riskiness indicator’ for 4700 globally traded products based on components such as market concentration, clustering tendencies, network centrality of players, or international substitutability to determine which products are vulnerable to trade shocks at the global level – referred to as ‘risky’ products. In a second step, bilateral risky product imports are matched to multi-country input–output tables, allowing for an examination of the importance of globally supplied risky products by country and industry. Due to the high percentage of dangerous products in high-tech product categories, higher-tech industries are more vulnerable to supply-chain vulnerabilities. Third, we analyse the GDP impact of reshoring using a “partial global extraction method.” Assuming that risky product imports from non-EU27 nations are re-shored to EU27 countries, the EU27 GDP might rise by up to 0.5 percent. Non-EU27 countries suffer as a result of such reshoring activity. This implies that ensuring robust or at least resilient supply networks is also in the interest of the supplier countries and sectors.