(Finance and Economics) How to break the global supply chain in the "card, break" crisis?
China News Agency, Beijing, January 16 (Liu Wenwen) Since the outbreak of the epidemic, the contradictions in the global supply chain have been further exposed, and new crises have continued to emerge.
On the one hand, the global aviation industry has suffered an unprecedented hit, and airlines have had to convert passenger planes to cargo planes to make up for their losses.
On the other hand, the shipping industry is not optimistic, the ports are congested, and there is a serious shortage of cabinets and workers.
Affected by the global supply chain crisis and poor logistics, McDonald's in Japan has recently experienced a "french fries shortage", and KFC in Australia has also been forced to stop supplying fried chicken.
The phenomenon of "stuck chain" and "broken chain" is further spreading around the world. When will the global supply chain crisis turn around?
Wang Xiaosong, a researcher at the National Institute of Development and Strategy of Renmin University of China, told a reporter from China News Agency that on the surface, the epidemic has caused factories in some areas to be unable to operate, global production capacity is insufficient, transportation capacity has declined, and downstream inventory in the supply chain is low, resulting in supply shortages.
At a deeper level, the risk of "broken chain" is the consequence of rising trade protectionism, which hinders international economic and trade cooperation and disrupts the industrial chain. In addition, it is also constrained by labor shortages in major industrialized countries. The epidemic has only made the problem more prominent.
Therefore, the supply chain crisis is essentially the concentrated outbreak of problems in the global trade and industrial fields in recent years under the background of the epidemic.
Due to different concepts of global value chain, different countries also hold different views on the optimization scheme of global supply chain.
"Rebuild" or "Repair"?
Developed and developing countries are divided.
Wang Xiaosong analyzed that developed countries believe that they are the advocates and leaders of globalization, but their interests are damaged in the global value chain. economic security is also a challenge.
Therefore, the direction of the reconstruction of the supply chain in developed countries is to "extend the value chain" and "re-industrialization", that is, to re-emphasize the manufacturing industry, improve its own manufacturing production capacity, and make it possible to participate in more links in the global value chain. Thereby maintaining industrial security, and at the same time reversing the status quo that the dividends of globalization are mainly obtained by developing countries.
He further pointed out that for developing countries, the global economic and trade rules formulated by developed countries are not good for themselves.
In the global value chain, they are often at the low end, engaged in the production of labor-intensive and low-value-added products or links, and will be suppressed and hindered in the process of industrial upgrading.
Therefore, developing countries hope to make the international economic and trade rules beneficial to them as much as possible while keeping the main body structure unchanged, and to achieve a higher status in the value chain, so they hope to "repair" the supply chain.
It is not difficult to see that the collision of the two concepts will be more intense in the future.
After the epidemic, how will the global industrial chain and supply chain evolve?
Zhou Ying, associate professor of the School of Economics of Minzu University of China and director of the International Economics and Trade Teaching and Research Office, told a reporter from China News Agency that under the globalization layout, the production chain is long, and each country focuses on one of the links, and the entire production chain has certain risks.
Especially after the epidemic, the supply chain is "stuck and broken", and people reconsider the elasticity and resilience of the supply chain.
"Generally speaking, one thing that can be observed is that the value chain shows a trend of regionalization and gradually shortening, which is not only brought about by the new crown epidemic, but also accompanied by the emergence of the entire global economic governance and new technologies. change." Zhou Ying pointed out.
She further explained that, on the one hand, the original division of labor was finer, and each enterprise focused on its own core business and outsourced non-core business.
However, with the emergence of new management methods, governance methods, and communication methods, vertical integration has been strengthened, and some industries have shown a trend of shortening the value chain.
On the other hand, as the multilateral coordination function of the World Trade Organization (WTO) is in trouble, and there are more and more regional trade agreements and bilateral trade agreements, the entire economic and trade activities are developing towards regionalization, and the regionalization trend of global production is gradually deepen.
In this regard, Wang Xiaosong also expressed a similar view.
One important factor that cannot be overlooked, he said, is new types of trade agreements.
Agreements such as the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), in which China has participated, play an important role in coordinating international economic and trade rules and maintaining regional and global value chains.
Under the framework of these agreements, if members can coordinate frankly and effectively, the regional integration will be deepened and the global supply chain will be optimized, which will not only solve the current supply chain crisis, but also maintain the development of globalization.
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