Source: VoxEU

The Signal: When it comes to coronavirus-induced supply chain issues, toilet paper and masks quickly come to mind. But with the interconnected state of global commerce, there are many other notable supply chain disruptions affecting billions of dollars in goods (including smartphones and automobiles).

One study by VoxEU, the Centre for Economic Policy Research’s policy portal, set out to put a dollar figure on exactly how costly supply chain disruptions can be:

When Wuhan, one of China’s “Detroits,” was locked down, it is
reported that some automobile manufacturing plants in Japan shrank their production due to a lack of supplies of parts and components from China. When we consider the economic impact of a lockdown, we therefore need to take this propagation to other economies into account…The economic shock of a disaster propagates downstream to customers through lack of supplies, and upstream to suppliers through lack of demand.