The COVID-19 Pandemic and Trade in the US: How Policy Response and Industry Ties Relate to Export Disruptions

Using a social network analysis model, we examine for each of the United States how aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic led to the propagation of export disruptions. We specifically measure the impact of import disruptions, COVID-related hospitalizations, subsequent policy responses, and structural network effects. In addition to looking at contemporaneous effects, we also include lagged policy response variables to see if these result different disruption recovery trends. Our results show that disruptions will noticeably cluster along industry connections. Our results are also consistent with past work that shows that non-pharmaceutical policy interventions have had limited contemporaneous effects on trade flows and extend these findings to show that up to six months after policy interventions, the impact of pandemic-related policy on exports disruptions is limited.