Importantly, these disruptions were not driven just by China a significant proportion of firms had experienced disruption to deliveries caused by other factors. More than three-quarters of these firms had experienced at least one disruption to deliveries of inputs since the start of the pandemic. To better understand the challenges firms have faced on account of the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) conducted a short telephone survey between May and July 2022, talking to 815 firms that are both direct exporters and importers in 15 countries: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Morocco, Poland, Romania, Serbia, the Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Tunisia, and Turkey. Trade disruptions were not just caused by China In Chapter 3 of Business Unusual, the EBRD Transition Report 2022-23, we document the extent of disruptions that firms have faced and the actions they took to adapt and to boost their resilience (EBRD 2022: Chapter 3). Instead, the war has cemented the belief that supply-chain disruptions are not going away soon as it has created prospects of further geopolitical (and thus trade) tensions. This is not because Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine were highly integrated in global supply chains themselves (Attinasi et al.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine, in particular, has been a trigger for global supply chain reshuffling – defined here as firms’ diversification of their supplier base in order to achieve greater resilience (Baldwin and Freeman 2022).
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At the same time, international political cooperation has begun to falter, and many people have become disenchanted with free trade. Trade disruptions appear to have increased in frequency and are likely to destabilise global supply chains going forward, too. Recent large-scale supply-side disruptions include the Covid-19 pandemic, the port congestion during the post-pandemic recovery, the blockage of the Suez Canal, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The last couple of years have seen many disruptions to ‘business as usual’ and ‘trade as usual’.
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