Stephen Wilks (University Detroit Mercy School of Law) has posted Designed for Disruption: When Covid19 Collides with a Fractured Supply Chain and a Politicized Global Trading System (in Elizabeth Kirley & Deborah Porter, eds., Outsmarting the Next Pandemic (Taylor & Francis 2022)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
To unknowing observers, the current climate might create the impression that conflict between governments—or between governments and the private sector—over coveted medical equipment are new to global supply chains already coping with other pandemic-related burdens. One disaster response expert described the scenario as “Lord of the Flies: PPE Edition.” These contests also seem at odds with Hobbesian social contract theories as normally expressed through state power. At a minimum, this power should work to protect citizens or, at the very least, avoid undermining them. After all, we are used to governments across the ideological spectrum demonstrating fealty to this principle during natural disasters, plane crashes, large-scale industrial accidents, or other events where societies anticipate a role for the state in bringing stability to disorder. But other features of the social contract have eroded in developed countries, particularly those centered around labor-management relations, which have coincided with the hardening of working-class attitudes toward migrant labor and internationalism more broadly. The current state of international trade may well be the logical result of a globalized economy accelerating core features of this devolution, most notably through a mix of competitive deregulation, falling trade barriers, and the strategic expansion of manufacturing footprints outside the developed world. But it is just as plausible that supply chains require recalibration to improve their agility and resilience in a global marketplace where other structural problems have been afoot and which precede COVID-19’s arrival. This book chapter captures how politicization can severely undermine supply chain management and worsen the effects of a pandemic.