The Impact of COVID-19 on Global Import and Export Trade

ABSTRACT

Motivation This article discusses the impact of COVID-19 on import and export trade, and what roles the degree of epidemic spread, the degree of malignancy, and the governments' epidemic prevention and control responses have played in the waves of COVID-19 infections. Premise Since the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 has had a huge impact on the world health system and has profoundly affected the global economy and import and export trade. The volume of import and export trade in most countries around the world has experienced a significant decline. The global supply chain system has suffered huge challenges due to the epidemic, its management, and each country's governmental response. Approach: This article describes the spread and development of COVID-19 and its phased impact on international trade. This article also discusses the impact mechanism of the epidemic on international import and export trade and the global supply chain system. The study uses trend analysis and fixed effects models to analyze the influence factor on import and export trade of nine major economies (the United States, China, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Japan, Canada, India, and Australia) in 2020. Results: This study explores COVID-19's effects on international import and export trade. It estimates the impact of COVID-19 on the import and export trade of each country, discussing the relationship between the whole epidemic situation, the number of epidemic infections and deaths, and how governments responded to international trade in this epidemic. The study also groups nine countries from four aspects and analyzes the differences in the impact of import and export trade among different groups. Conclusion: This study has found that for most countries, the COVID-19 epidemic had greater impact on the import trade than export trade. The number of deaths caused by the epidemic had a greater impact on import and export trade than the number of epidemic infections. Each government's epidemic prevention and control policy had a negative impact on the import and export trade. Discovering appropriate policies that could reduce the impact on the economy while preventing and controlling an epidemic is of great importance. The further impact of COVID-19 might change the global industrial layout in the future, but the global supply chain system will not experience huge changes in the short term. Consistency This research explores the fluctuations and the recovery cycles of the international trading system. The quantitative analysis finds out the negative effects of regional control policies and mobility restriction policies in different countries. It contributes to the business for coping with sudden risks in international supply chain system.