To Trade or Not to Trade: Analyzing How Perturbations Travel in Sparsely Connected Networks

Towards food supply chain resilience to environmental shocks

“…For more global food supply chains, a range of recent network-based modelling studies have attempted to evaluate the distant impacts of food supply shocks, finding that highly globalized countries 44 , net importers and low-GDP countries [45][46][47] , and countries with low strategic reserves 48 are most exposed to external shock events. Other agent-based modelling work has found that shocks travel more easily across networks when the perturbed product is directly traded 51 and that the indirect economic effects of supply chain shocks (for example, firm-to-firm disruptions that a natural hazard causes) can exceed direct impacts (for example, physical damage from the natural hazard) 52 . One of the primary ways by which shock propagation along supply chains has been examined in the literature is through the effects of disruptions on prices.…”