Description
Since the initial shutdown of economic activities in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, global production and logistics networks have not been able to recover back to normal and deliver goods in time. This crisis of production and logistics has had political ramifications for the state’s worst organized for disruption and may be stifling policies aimed at refloating the economy post pandemic. A rethinking and reorganization of the post-pandemic global networks of production and circulation is now underway. This paper aims at understanding the disruption to global production networks under pandemic conditions and its consequences for the structure of global production networks and their future. In doing so it explores the logistics market structures and dynamics as well as the national and global policies that made global supply chains vulnerable prior to the pandemic. Thereafter the paper tracks the strategies and policies by firms and states respectively to fend off and ameliorate congestions at logistics bottlenecks. Using the concept of infrastructural power within a geoeconomics and a Global Production Networks framework, this paper argues for the importance of logistics as a conduit for infrastructural power. The reorganization of global supply chains may lead into more regionalized global production networks with distinct gravitational poles organized surrounding the Asian, European and North American regions, with a focus on resilience and reliability, creating a new set of winners and losers in the global economy.
