Distributed production under the pandemic shock: Vulnerability, resilience and the new stage of globalization

The paper draws attention to a new wave of public and academic debate on the future of globalization and on rationality of countries’ further participation in distributed production, i.e., their involvement in global value chains (GVCs) and value-added trade. Raised during the COVID-19 pandemic shock, this debate is the reaction of countries to the global diffusion of downfalls through transborder supplies. We analyze vulnerabilities of GVCs to sudden shocks, demonstrate the role of these risks in escalating the 2020 global recession and in shaping its unique features, as well as scrutinize the emerging post-pandemic strategies of leading MNEs for enhancing the GVC resilience. We argue that despite the collapse of the just-in-time supply system and the crucial dependency of many domestic industries on imports from China, the pandemic shock could neither undermine foundations of distributed production nor lead to mass reshoring. On the contrary, both analyzed practice and surveyed econometric literature confirm that benefits of countries’ participation in GVCs outweigh risks of their falling under potential rippling disruptions. Moreover, MNEs’ resilience strategies, which we classified into three interrelated lines of action (restructuring of GVCs’ supplier networks, production optimization, and GVCs’ digital transformation), give globalization a new impetus. We conclude with describing the changing features of distributed production under the ongoing GVCs’ restructuring and outline a number of promising export opportunities that objectively open up in the 2020s for developing economies, including Russia. In the course of our study, we examine key properties of resilient systems (robustness, flexibility, redundancy), some new notions (disruption risks, ripple effect, etc.), and new management approaches relevant for all types of economies and businesses under increased uncertainty.