No Arabic abstract
Because of the ongoing Covid-19 crisis, supply chain management performance seems to be struggling. The purpose of this paper is to examine a variety of critical factors related to the application of contingency theory to determine its feasibility in preventing future supply chain bottlenecks. The study reviewed current online news reports, previous research on contingency theory, as well as strategic and structural contingency theories. This paper also systematically reviewed several global supply chain management and strategic decision-making studies in an effort to promote a new strategy. The findings indicated that the need for mass production of products within the United States, as well as within trading partners, is necessary to prevent additional Covid-19 related supply chain gaps. The paper noted that in many instances, the United States has become dependent on foreign products, where the prevention of future supply chain gaps requires the United States restore its manufacturing prowess.
We provide quantitative predictions of first order supply and demand shocks for the U.S. economy associated with the COVID-19 pandemic at the level of individual occupations and industries. To analyze the supply shock, we classify industries as essential or non-essential and construct a Remote Labor Index, which measures the ability of different occupations to work from home. Demand shocks are based on a study of the likely effect of a severe influenza epidemic developed by the US Congressional Budget Office. Compared to the pre-COVID period, these shocks would threaten around 22% of the US economys GDP, jeopardise 24% of jobs and reduce total wage income by 17%. At the industry level, sectors such as transport are likely to have output constrained by demand shocks, while sectors relating to manufacturing, mining and services are more likely to be constrained by supply shocks. Entertainment, restaurants and tourism face large supply and demand shocks. At the occupation level, we show that high-wage occupations are relatively immune from adverse supply and demand-side shocks, while low-wage occupations are much more vulnerable. We should emphasize that our results are only first-order shocks -- we expect them to be substantially amplified by feedback effects in the production network.
We analyse the distribution and the flows between different types of employment (self-employment, temporary, and permanent), unemployment, education, and other types of inactivity, with particular focus on the duration of the school-to-work transition (STWT). The aim is to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy on the careers of individuals aged 15-34. We find that the pandemic worsened an already concerning situation of higher unemployment and inactivity rates and significantly longer STWT duration compared to other EU countries, particularly for females and residents in the South of Italy. In the midst of the pandemic, individuals aged 20-29 were less in (permanent and temporary) employment and more in the NLFET (Neither in the Labour Force nor in Education or Training) state, particularly females and non Italian citizens. We also provide evidence of an increased propensity to return to schooling, but most importantly of a substantial prolongation of the STWT duration towards permanent employment, mostly for males and non Italian citizens. Our contribution lies in providing a rigorous estimation and analysis of the impact of COVID-19 on the carriers of young individuals in Italy, which has not yet been explored in the literature.
Background: A major question in Covid-19 research is whether democracies handled the Covid-19 pandemic crisis better or worse than authoritarian countries. However, it is important to consider the issues of democracy versus authoritarianism, and state fragility, when examining official Covid-19 death counts in research, because these factors can influence the accurate reporting of pandemic deaths by governments. In contrast, excess deaths are less prone to variability in differences in definitions of Covid-19 deaths and testing capacities across countries. Here we use excess pandemic deaths to explore potential relationships between political systems and public health outcomes. Methods: We address these issues by comparing the official government Covid-19 death counts in a well-established John Hopkins database to the generally more reliable excess mortality measure of Covid-19 deaths, taken from the recently released World Mortality Dataset. We put the comparison in the context of the political and fragile state dimensions. Findings: We find (1) significant potential underreporting of Covid-19 deaths by authoritarian governments and governments with high state fragility and (2) substantial geographic variation among countries and regions with regard to standard democracy indices. Additionally, we find that more authoritarian governments are (weakly) associated with more excess deaths during the pandemic than democratic governments. Interpretations: The inhibition and censorship of information flows, inherent to authoritarian states, likely results in major inaccuracies in pandemic statistics that confound global public health analyses. Thus, both excess pandemic deaths and official Covid-19 death counts should be examined in studies using death as an outcome variable.
Natural and anthropogenic disasters frequently affect both the supply and demand side of an economy. A striking recent example is the Covid-19 pandemic which has created severe disruptions to economic output in most countries. These direct shocks to supply and demand will propagate downstream and upstream through production networks. Given the exogenous shocks, we derive a lower bound on total shock propagation. We find that even in this best case scenario network effects substantially amplify the initial shocks. To obtain more realistic model predictions, we study the propagation of shocks bottom-up by imposing different rationing rules on industries if they are not able to satisfy incoming demand. Our results show that economic impacts depend strongly on the emergence of input bottlenecks, making the rationing assumption a key variable in predicting adverse economic impacts. We further establish that the magnitude of initial shocks and network density heavily influence model predictions.
How has the science system reacted to the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic? Here we compare the (growing) international network for coronavirus research with the broader international health science network. Our findings show that, before the outbreak, coronavirus research realized a relatively small and rather peculiar niche within the global health sciences. As a response to the pandemic, the international network for coronavirus research expanded rapidly along the hierarchical structure laid out by the global health science network. Thus, in face of the crisis, the global health science system proved to be structurally stable yet versatile in research. The observed versatility supports optimistic views on the role of science in meeting future challenges. However, the stability of the global core-periphery structure may be worrying, because it reduces learning opportunities and social capital of scientifically peripheral countries -- not only during this pandemic but also in its normal mode of operation.