COVID-19 and world trade

This shows that, for products crossing borders with a greater share of processing trade, imports are more resistant to the negative impact of COVID‐19 deaths and of lockdowns. This could reflect the fact that processing trade usually involves closer relationships between domestic processing firms in China and their foreign partners. Now, just like in any other gravity estimation, it is important to control for changes in economic conditions in third countries. To do so, we consider in our analysis COVID‐19 incidence and lockdown policies in the rest of the world , with greater weights given by those variables in the country’s main trading partners, as defined in equation . The results from adding those variables to our regression are reported in columns 3 and 4. In column 3, we have the same set of fixed effects as in column 2, to make it clear the sole effect of adding the third‐country variables. In terms of sign, the estimated coefficients on CovidD and on Stringency do not change with the introduction of third‐country variables, remaining negative and estimated very precisely.

Two of our big exports, aircraft and automobile parts, are down 30 to 40 percent. On the other hand, semiconductors, which has been in the news a lot — we’re trying to restrict our semiconductor sales to Huawei, the Chinese telecom company. Well, overall, our semiconductors exports went up by 12 percent in the first half of the year.

TABLE 4

Trade disruptions impair the production of goods that are dependent on imports , and the export or import of finished products. For example, to ensure that domestic production was dedicated to local needs, in March 2020, the EU introduced a regulation making exports of certain products subject to authorization .

Tariffs and other restrictions to imports further impair the flow of critical products to developing countries. This paper analyzes the impact of Covid-19 and uncooperative trade policies on world food markets. It quantifies the initial shock due to the pandemic under the assumption that products that are more labor intensive in production are more affected through workers’ morbidity and containment policies.

Services

4Friedt and Zhang use China’s exports data until May 2020 at the province–country–product level and find that China’s exports are very sensitive to foreign countries’ new cases https://www.bigshotrading.info/ and domestic new cases. Che et al. use China’s export data until May 2020 at the country–product level and find that China’s exports decline when foreign cases increase.

The decrease in non-tourism services trade, comprising transport, finance, communications and business services, was much lower than that of tourism. Between March and August 2020, exports and imports of non-tourism services decreased by 12.6% and 16.6%, respectively. Figures for tourism export and imports were 85.8% and 79.9%, respectively. The Survey of International Trade in Services provided by the National Statistics Institute reported an increase in business and financial service exports during the second quarter of 2020 relative to the same period of 2019. Communications and insurances were the only branches showing positive import growth during the second quarter of 2020 .

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In high-income countries, the effect on food outputs might be small, at least for staple products, because much food production is now mechanised and requires fewer workers than elsewhere. In another survey, firms considered that a decrease in foreign demand would have a larger impact on their activity than would disruptions in the supply chain (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, 2020). IMF also contended that the decline in trade volumes largely reflected weak final demand from customers and firms. Darker colors represent provinces that specialized in vehicles, fuels and apparel.

• For example, some of the export restrictions to essential goods are still in place, services trade has yet to recover to pre-pandemic levels, and cross-border data restrictions have increased globally.
• The sample without OECD countries yields results that are qualitatively similar to the baseline results in Table ​ Table1.
• The American Chamber of Commerce did a recent poll of their members to see if they were thinking of leaving China, and I believe over 80 percent had no thoughts about moving any production out of China.
• While we have seen areas with remarkable resilience, the problem is that it is only for some and threatens to leave many behind.
• Travel firms were at the sharp end of the sell-off and have continued to see volatility, as lockdowns have caused a standstill.
• But then if you go deeper into the value chain, China has moved into the middle of the value chain producing machinery and components.

Export restrictions are also expected to have an impact on world prices . These measures are intended to offset domestic shortages and rising prices as demand for COVID-19 related products surges. But restrictive measures by exporting countries reduce global supply, leading to even higher prices. In the short run, we estimate that current export restrictions trading coronavirus could increase prices of medical masks by 20.5% and prices of Venturi masks by 9.1%. Prices of protective equipment such as aprons and gloves are estimated to increase between 1 and 2% due to the current restrictions. The high concentration of imports in certain products makes developing countries extremely vulnerable to changes in policies by exporters.

1. Data

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If COVID-19 continues to increase the costs of traveling, international business meetings and fairs will continue to diminish, reducing Spanish firms’ opportunities for opening new trade relationships. The first significant negative impact of COVID-19 on Spanish trade occurred on February 12, 2020, when the organizers of the World Mobile Congress, a major event contributing to service exports, announced its cancellation because of health risks. That month, firms began to worry that a lack of intermediate inputs manufactured in China would lead to production shutdowns (Expansión, 2020). These concerns further increased when some northern Italian regions that hosted factories that exported components to Spain were put under quarantine at the end of February (Vozpópuli, 2020). However, it was in March, in response to the declaration of the state of alarm in Spain and the introduction of confinement measures in many other countries, when COVID-19 began to have a significantly negative impact on trade flows.