COVID-19 shock on supply chains: evidence from a developing country

In this paper we evaluate the impact of COVID-19 lockdown policies on Tunisia’s supply chains. We estimate a Poisson Pseudo Maximum Likelihood model using data on bilateral imports for intermediate, capital, and final goods for the years 2019 and 2020 at the country–month–product level. Our results show that, overall, lockdowns in Tunisia’s partner countries had a significant and negative effect on imports made under both offshore and onshore regimes. Specifically, we observe a considerable fall in imports of intermediate and final goods under the offshore regime, which primarily involves firms producing goods for export and having a higher level of integration in global value chains. Additionally, all types of imports made under the onshore regime were affected by exporter lockdowns. Our results also reveal a certain heterogeneity related to some specific product and product–country characteristics.