Evaluation of the Pandemic Impact on Global Automotive Supply Chain through Network Analysis

The restrictive measures that have been imposed from March 2020 on business activities in several countries to reduce the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic can be interpreted as shocks to global supply chains. We propose some agent-based models to evaluate the economic effects of different lockdown policies on the global automotive supply chain. Our analysis involves 3,323 companies belonging to 135 economic sectors and connected by 11,182 trade links. This network was sampled from 2018 to 2020. As far as know, this is the first study to map the global automotive supply chain across both industries and countries at the level of single companies. By reconstructing the network and simulating the effects of diverse lockdown policies, we get two significant insights. Companies characterized by a high elasticity of substitution of productive inputs in the short-term suffer less from restrictions than those with a rigid inputs mix, either because of their specific production technology or market position. This has a significant aggregate impact on economic activity. Therefore, targeted lockdown policies may bear less economic costs than generalized ones, such as locking down all companies in specific sectors. Our simulations provide useful information for policymakers about the relative costs of possible lockdown interventions