Exploring the impacts of Covid-19 on the electronic product trade of the G-7 countries: A complex network analysis approach and panel data analysis

Abstract

The present study attempts to explore the impacts of COVID-19 on the intra-group electronic product trade of the world’s seven largest economies. In line with this purpose, we performed a complex network analysis of the electronic product trade of the group of seven (G-7) countries and China, as well as a panel data study comprising solely the G-7 countries. In this regard, we investigated the trade networks within the G-7 countries, to which China has been added, and determined the prominent countries in the network during the pandemic to be China, the USA and Canada. The findings also revealed that China, one of the pioneering countries in electronic product trade, has the most ties in electronic products exports with the USA, the other countries with which the USA had the most ties were Japan and Germany, apart from Canada. It was discovered that Germany was the most active country in the network, following the USA, in terms of export ties and the number of export countries in its network. The panel data analysis, on the other hand, yielded two different models, namely import and export, based on 22 months of data, from March 2020 to December 2021, considering the World Health Organization’s (WHO) declaration of COVID-19 as a pandemic on March 11, 2020. The findings showed that independent variables affecting the electronic product trade within G-7 countries bore different effects in both models, that the deaths/cases ratio, the tests/cases ratio and the number of cases had adverse impacts while the population had positive impacts on exports in the first model, and that the tests/population ratio had adverse effects while the number of tests and the population had positive impacts on intra-group electronic product imports.