Beyond the COVID-19 pandemic: Coping with the ‘new normal’ in supply chains
Among other things, the COVID-19 crisis has called for the reassessment of risks and sourcing criteria in global value chains (GVCs) and for their shortening. This, in turn, has given momentum to discussions on the establishment and strengthening of national and regional supply chains. The new pattern of GVCs remodelled to fit into this new design will have to absorb extra costs from redundancy and inefficiency, which will eventually be shifted onto consumers. In the Asia-Pacific region small developing economies, in particular least developed countries (LDCs), will suffer the most; not only have they struggled to be included in the GVCs of the recent past, but the new shortened GVCs might bypass them altogether.
