Emerging trend on international capital flows and global value chains reconstruction under post COVID-19: a review

Abstract

The global outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has slowed down international investment and trade, and partially disrupted the global supply chain. This paper provides an overview of the findings in 80 scholarly articles from recent years, comprehensively summarises and analyzes the research on international capital flows and global value chain（GVC）reconstruction, and deeply reveals the impact of COVID-19 on OFDI, the change of OFDI performance before and after the pandemic and factors that may accelerate GVC reconstruction in the future. We identify research gaps in a combination of OFDI and GVC reconstruction at both the macro and micro level and suggest several future research topics such as political risk and bilateral relations factors, the role of China in OFDI and GVC dynamics, network and OFDI performance, network characteristics of GVC reconstruction, OFDI and GVC reconstruction.

Keywords:

• COVID-19 pandemic
• OFDI
• OFDI performance
• GVC reconstruction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See UNCTAD(2021).Global Trade Update. Retrieved from https://unctad.org/webflyer/global-trade-update-february-2021

2 See UNCTAD(2021). Global Investment Trend Monitor. Retrieved from https://unctad.org/webflyer/global-investment-trend-monitor-no-38

3 See OECD (2020).COVID-19 and Global Capital Flows. Retrieved from https://www.oecd.org/coronavirus/en/policy-responses

4 Based on FDI inflows for 153 economies for which data are available. These economies account for 98% of global FDI flows.

5 See UNCTAD. (2020) World Investment Report 2020. Geneva: UNCTAD.

https://worldinvestmentreport.unctad.org/world-investment-report-2020/

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Social Science Fund of China [No. 17VDL012 and No. 18ZDA095]; the Ministry of Education of China [No. 17JJD630001]; the National Natural Science Foundation of China [No. 71672051]; and the Interdisciplinary Research Funding Program for Doctoral Students of Jilin University [No. 101832020DJX008].