Public health emergencies and international trade in the context of global value chains: Evidence from COVID‐19 in China

Bo Lu, Xiaohua Bao and Cai Wang

The World Economy, 2025, vol. 48, issue 1, 188-212

Abstract: In recent years, there has been a notable increase in the frequency of public health emergencies (PHE), which pose a substantial threat to the global supply and demand equilibrium as well as the stability of the global value chains (GVC). The article takes the example of the COVID‐19 pandemic and utilises China's foreign trade monthly data spanning from 2018 to 2021 for an empirical analysis of how COVID‐19 affected China's import and export trade, as well as its participation in GVC collaborations. The findings are as follows: (1) The proliferation of COVID‐19 significantly and negatively impacted China's export trade, while its impact on China's import trade was insignificant. (2) The impact of the COVID‐19 on processing trade exports was more pronounced compared to general trade exports, highlighting the detrimental effect of the pandemic on GVC collaboration. (3) The adverse influence of the COVID‐19 on China's foreign trade and GVC cooperation primarily stemmed from its impact on international effective demand. (4) The pandemic exerted a more substantial negative effect on processing trade involving supplied materials with low production value added compared to processing trade involving imported materials with high value added. And it had a greater adverse impact on low‐tech products as opposed to high‐tech products, indicating that industries with higher value‐added and high‐tech products exhibited greater resilience in the face of trade disruptions by COVID‐19.

Date: 2025
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