EU27 regional trade networks for medical products in fight against Covid-19 pandemic: Quantifying vulnerability and self sufficiency in critical inputs

The Covid-19 pandemic spread fast due to a lack of vaccines and a severe shortage of medical products to treat and combat the disease. Many studies have focused on the characteristics of extant global supply chains and trade networks that are determined by globalization drives for production to low-cost countries and the technological complexity of products with many components distributed globally. This, along with the lockdown of many sectors and national policies that divert exports for domestic use, are reasons for lack of access, especially, in Western countries to these products. Governments adopted policies that aim to mitigate vulnerability to imports of critical medical products that include self-sufficiency measures such as increased domestic production, stockpiling and reduction of exports. However, there is as yet no quantitative way to assess if a country’s vulnerability to critical imports has been reduced by such drives for self-sufficiency, when other countries in the trade network follow similar policies. For this we develop a Google PageRank style centrality measure based on the Markose-Giansante eigen-pair method for a specially constructed global bilateral trade network to assess the vulnerability of net importers of critical medical products when they attempt to mitigate it by regional or domestic buffers. We use the network vulnerability centrality measure to quantify the regional self-sufficiency for EU27 countries over 2019–2021 for four Covid-19 critical medical products, viz. facemasks, personal protective equipment, ventilators and hand sanitizers. Despite, growth in value and share of intra-EU regional trade in most of these products by 2021, some countries did not achieve the reduction of vulnerability centrality.