Disruption of international trade and its propagation through firm-level domestic supply chains: A case of Japan

Abstract

This study simulates how the disruption of imports from various regions affects the total production of the importer economy. We particularly incorporate the propagation of the economic effect through domestic supply chains using data on more than one million firms and four million supply chain ties in Japan. Our findings are summarized as follows. First, the negative effect of the disruption of intermediate imports grows exponentially as its duration and strength increase due to downstream propagation. Second, the propagation of the economic effect is substantially affected by the network topology of importers, such as the number of importers (affected nodes) and their degree of upstreamness in supply chains, whereas the effect of their degree centrality is heterogeneous depending on their degree of upstreamness. Finally, the negative effect of import disruption can be mitigated by the reorganization of domestic supply chains, even when conducted only among network neighbors. Our findings provide important policy and managerial implications for the achievement of more robust and resilient global supply chains.