Speeding up Slowbalization: Global Value Chains after COVID-19

The global spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 brutally exposed the vulnerabilities of hyper-connected just-in-time production networks. It was met by prominent calls by business and political leaders to prioritize resilience over efficiency and re-shore global production. More than one year after the most severe pandemic-related disruptions of global supply chains, this paper provides an assessment of the extent to which the COVID-19 pandemic has altered the political economy of globalized production. Rather than fundamentally changing the structural organization of multinational corporations, it is argued, the pandemic highlighted and accelerated important trends that were already well under way before the outbreak of the pandemic. Even though the COVID-19 crisis has not fundamentally altered infrastructures of global production, there are indications that transnational production networks are in the process of bifurcating further into a US- and a China-centered sphere—with more cross-border integration within but less across the two—in the years to come.