Visualizing Spatial Economic Supply Chains to Enhance Sustainability and Resilience

This article presents a spatial supply network model for estimating and visualizing spatial commodity flows that used data on firm location and employment, an input–output table of inter-industry transactions, and material balance-type equations. Building on earlier work, we proposed a general method for visualizing detailed supply chains across geographic space, applying the preferential attachment rule to gravity equations in the network context; we then provided illustrations for U.S. extractive, manufacturing, and service industries, also highlighting differences in rural–urban interdependencies across these sectors. The resulting visualizations may be helpful for better understanding supply chain geographies, as well as business interconnections and interdependencies, and to anticipate and potentially address vulnerabilities to different types of shocks.

The impacts of financing constraints on the quality upgrading of China's agri-food exporters

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to identify the impacts of financing constraints on the quality upgrading of China's agri-food sector.Design/methodology/approachOur empirical study is performed using the “distance to the frontier” framework. We employ a merged sample of Chinese agri-food trading firms based on Chinese firm-level data from the National Bureau of Statistics of China and Chinese customs data. To verify robustness, we test whether the results hold when using different definitions of quality upgrading and alternative proxy variables for product quality and financing constraints. To examine the heterogeneous effects, we generate subsamples by firm location, export destination and the product sophistication of exports.FindingsThe results suggest that financing constraints have a significant negative impact on the product quality upgrading of Chinese agri-food export firms. In addition, the negative impacts of financing constraints are more severe for firms close to the quality frontier than for those far from the frontier. These results are robust to various checks. Moreover, the heterogeneous effects of financing constraints on quality upgrading are identified when the sample is split according to firm location, export destination and the sophistication of export products.Originality/valueThis paper reviews and applies some recent studies in the literature to investigate the relationship between financing constraints and the product quality upgrading of agri-food export firms in China. Overall, the results of this paper could be considered of importance for promoting the quality upgrading of export products in the China's agri-food sector.