Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

3-2023

Abstract

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.

Keywords

COVID-19, International trade network, Resilience, Vulnerability

Discipline

Databases and Information Systems | Health Information Technology

Research Areas

Intelligent Systems and Optimization

Publication

Applied Geography

Volume

154

First Page

1

Last Page

15

ISSN

0143-6228

Identifier

10.1016/j.apgeog.2023.102923

Publisher

Elsevier

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2023.102923

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