In October 2022, a new 3-year research project was launched with the aim of learning about Global Supply Chains and their impact on the economy. The project entitled “Rethinking Global Supply Chains: measurement, impact and policy” (RETHINK-GSC) is supported by a Horizon Europe grant and it is carried out by an international research consortium under the coordination of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.

The KRTK core research team consists of Gábor Békés, Márta Bisztray, Miklós Koren, and Balázs Lengyel. Throughout the project, we work together with researchers of prestigious institutes and universities from Austria (WIFO), Belgium (Bruegel), Denmark (Aarhus), France (Paris Dauphine and CIREM), Germany (IfW Kiel), Ireland (UC Dublin), Italy (Salento), Norway (Oslo) and Poland (Gdansk).

Global supply chains play an important role in today’s economy. While their operation is heavily affected by current economic disruptions and uncertainties, how they evolve in the future will have a crucial impact on the economy worldwide. The aim of the project is to get a better understanding of the global value chain’s changing nature. It focuses on aspects which have a high importance in that but which are difficult to capture, such as the role of knowledge flows, services and intangibles in general.

One goal of the project team is to construct new measures of knowledge and service flows. Resulting research output will inform policy makers about ongoing and expected changes, the resilience of global supply chains to shocks and about their impact on economic and social outcomes in Europe, guiding them in policy design.

The KRTK team is involved in multiple sub-projects. A major contribution is conducting a multi-country firm-level survey, in which we get detailed insight on the nature of knowledge flows in buyer-supplier relationships, addressing recent challenges and future outlooks, including the role of face-to-face communication in transferring knowledge and contributing to innovation.