The EU gains resilience from being open and integrated in global supply chains, but there are also associated risks likely to affect specific products and inputs that are particularly critical for the EU’s society and economy.
Our Supply Chain Analytics Hub aims at enhancing preparedness by monitoring structural trends and real-time developments in supply chains and by analysing the economic implications of supply chain shifts.
We just released a new economic brief which compiles the methods, analyses and results behind DG GROW’s Supply Chain Analytics Hub. It walks you through our methodologies to: Monitor and anticipate strategic dependencies; Measure external vulnerabilities; Evaluate supply chain distress through our 'SCAN' method and the annual DG GROW-EIB dedicated survey; Monitor the reallocation of EU supply chains and phenomena such as reshoring, near-shoring and partner-shoring; and emerging work on supply chain stress testing.
- Understanding structural vulnerabilities in supply chains
Identifying areas subject to structural vulnerabilities is critical, given their tendency to entail heightened risks in the event of supply chain disruptions. To this end, we have developed data-driven methods to identify risk-prone areas ex-ante, complemented by in-depth reviews where systematic data is lacking.
- Bottom-up methodology to identify EU import dependencies at the product level (Arjona et al., 2023)
- this approach is also used to assess reverse dependencies (i.e. dependencies of the EU and a non-EU country on each other) and common dependencies (i.e. mutual dependencies of the EU and a non-EU country on the world or a specific partner).
- EXternal Vulnerability Index (EXVI) to quantify economic vulnerabilities to external shocks by analysing a region’s trade dependencies and trade competitive positions (Connell and Ho, 2025).
- Detailed assessments of the EU’s exposure to
- individual non-EU countries (e.g. EU-China exposure by Vandermeeren, 2024)
- technological dependencies (e.g. in-depth reviews of strategic dependencies).
- Monitoring supply chain distress
Monitoring the ever-evolving situation of supply chain distress is crucial to identify potential disruptions early on and determine where action may be needed. Our tools include
- an early warning system to monitor ongoing product-level distress in selected supply chains (Amaral et al., 2022), with regular updates available via the SCAN dashboard
- an annual firm-level Supply Chain Survey conducted jointly with the EIB, with findings presented in an annual report.
- Economic implications of supply chains shifts
Disruptions or structural changes in EU supply chains can have far-reaching effects on industry competitiveness and trade dynamics, among others. We conduct and support the conduct of rigorous analyses using econometric and other quantitative approaches to evaluate these implications. Selected works include
- exploring the EU’s evolving import sourcing strategy amid rising geopolitical tensions, with a focus on supply chain reorganisation, import diversification and price dynamics (Arjona et al., 2024)
- stress testing value chains by simulating the impact of an external shock on supply chain dynamics (Dumont and Varela-Irimia, 2024)
- tracing the impact of early COVID-19 lockdowns in China on Estonian supply chains using detailed VAT and customs data, through the LIFT project jointly developed with the OECD (Criscuolo et al., 2024).