"Lockdown disruptions to manufacturing and shipping transmit shocks across countries through global supply chains. This column uses a simulation analysis to quantify these impacts and finds that the transmission of foreign lockdowns accounted for one-third of the total Covid-19-related GDP contractions. However, renationalisation of global supply chains is unlikely to help insulate economies from future pandemic-driven lockdowns. The reason is that eliminating reliance on foreign inputs would increase the reliance on domestic inputs. Since a pandemic-related lockdown would also affect domestic input suppliers, there is generally no resilience benefit from renationalising international supply chains."

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