This dossier on the development of value chains* opens with an article by Vincent Vicard and Pauline Wibaux. The authors, drawing on more than 20 years’ worth of available trade data in Europe (1996-2019), find no clear trend emerging with regard to the number of products labelled ‘dependent’ in the European Union, although year-to-year variations are observable. On the other hand, they stress that the geographical pattern of trade is changing and that Europe is increasingly dependent on China and, to a lesser extent, on the USA and India (whereas its trade with Russia, with the exception of certain products, has declined appreciably).
However, Chinese industrial production has fallen off significantly since 2020, a development that has spread, through the value chains, to make a global impact — on the major automotive companies, among others. And Germany, the leading industrial power in Europe, has come to see the costs of its dependence on energy imports from Russia. The same is true for Europe in the fields of semi-conductors and rare metals. How will the situation develop in the future?
*Dossier / Europe: How are Value Chains to be Repatriated?
Globalization and a boom in international trade were major trends of the last decades of the past century, as a result, among other things, of the fragmentation of value chains. However, the Covid pandemic, followed by war in Ukraine and the tensions between China and the USA, together with the policies adopted by those two countries, have given rise to both a worry and a hope. A worry, on the one hand, since the EU realized that it was dependent, for example, for its supplies of pharmaceutical products, on active ingredients that it needed to import. A hope, on the other, that it could bring production back to its own territory and, failing that, diversify the origin of its imports. It became apparent at that point that the disadvantages of extending its value chains had been greater than the advantages, with the situation evolving to be detrimental to the strategic autonomy of Europe, its member states and its businesses.
How, then, have these value chains changed since that realization and the resolutions adopted at the time, including the European Union’s recovery plan (NextGenerationEU) adopted in December 2020, the ‘recovery and resilience facility’ (REPowerEU), established in February 2021, and its roll-out in the member states?
Let us recall, lastly, that, a fortnight before the G20 Summit in New Delhi on 9-10 September 2023, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) were sounding the alarm over world trade becoming increasingly ‘fragmented’. Bemoaning ‘technological decoupling’, Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the IMF, wrote in late August, that ‘as trade falls and barriers rise, global growth will take a severe hit.’ She estimates that ‘annual global GDP growth in 2028 will be only three percent — the IMF’s lowest five-year-ahead forecast in the past three decades’. To which the American Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, replies:Bemoaning ‘technological decoupling’, Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the IMF, wrote in late August, that ‘as trade falls and barriers rise, global growth will take a severe hit.’ She estimates that ‘annual global GDP growth in 2028 will be only three percent — the IMF’s lowest five-year-ahead forecast in the past three decades’. To which the American Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, replies: ‘We do not seek to decouple or to hold China’s economy back,’ adding, ‘we will never of course compromise in protecting our national security’.
In order to initiate thinking on the question of strategic dependency, we are publishing two articles in this brief dossier: this one by Vincent Vicard and Pauline Wibaux of the CEPII (the leading French center for research and expertise on the world economy), another one by Aymeric Lachaux of the Treasury Department of the French Finance Ministry.
In order to initiate thinking on the question of strategic dependency, we are publishing two articles in this brief dossier: one by Vincent Vicard and Pauline Wibaux of the CEPII (the leading French center for research and expertise on the world economy), the other by Aymeric Lachaux of the Treasury Department of the French Finance Ministry.
