The US-China Trade relations and COVID-19 have greatly reshaped the world trade networks, leading to unforeseen consequences for the world economy. This talk introduces two research projects to explore these shifts using data-driven approaches, including complex network analysis, multi-scale temporal event models with a difference-in-differences approach. The first research employed complex network analysis to assess the spatio-temporal heterogeneity of international trade network vulnerabilities during the COVID-19. We found that Asia-Pacific areas show the strongest resilience to ensure the world supply chain due to an effective COVID-19 containment, followed by high-income countries with fast vaccine roll-out (e.g., U.S.), whereas low-income countries (e.g., Africa) show high vulnerability. The second research examined the effects of the US-China trade relations and COVID-19 on U.S. imports separately and collectively, with various economic scopes. With multi-scale temporal event models in the context of a difference-in-differences approach, our findings uncover intricate trading dynamics among the U.S., China, and Southeast Asia, through which Southeast Asian exporters have integrated more into value chains centered on Chinese suppliers and the U.S. effectively imported more goods indirectly through Southeast Asian exporters that imported from China.

Speaker: Prof. Wei LUO
Date: 4 December 2024 (Wednesday)
Time: 2:00pm – 3:00pm
Venue: YEUNG Y5305
Poster: Click here