ERF 27th Annual Conference
Impact of COVID-19 on Tunisian Imports
No.
ERF27_118
Publisher
ERF
Date
May, 2021
Topic
F. International Economics
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the trade flows between countries, revealing the vulnerability related to global value chains (GVCs). This unexpected event sparked a public debate on devising new policies to increase the resilience of value chains. To this end, identifying the factors favoring the exposure to shortages resulting from disruption of supply is a prime concern. This paper assesses the effects of three potential drivers of vulnerability on Tunisia’s imports. The three factors subject to our study are country-specific product characteristics. We consider, for each product, (1) the market concentration of Tunisia’s partners, (2) the intensity of imports, and (3) the feasibility of the imported good in Tunisia. First, we classify the products imported by Tunisia into risky and less risky clusters based on the three factors of vulnerability. Second, we use a first level difference estimation to evaluate if the change in the imports of risky products explain the change in total imports at the country-month and at the country-quarter level between 2019 and 2020.
Authors
Amal Medini
PhD Candidate in Economics, University of Tunis
Research Fellows
Leila Baghdadi
Professor of Economics, ESSECT, University of Tunis