Mostafa Akesbi (p)

This paper examines the logistics performance of African countries using a multi-dimensional approach. For that examination, firstly, a bench of literature review will be revised. Then employing a gravity on a sample of African countries, in order to test which of LPI’s component has impact on volume of trade across African countries. Finally, a multidimensional index will be created in order to classify the countries based on their performance on logistics. The purpose of this study can inform policymakers and practitioners in developing targeted interventions to enhance logistics performance in Africa, which can contribute to economic growth and development in the region.

Gábor Túry (p), Eva Křenková, Petr Procházka

Yuri Mansury

Since 2019, automotive supply chains have been challenged by the Covid-19 pandemic. Another unexpected event stroke the industry hard in the first half of 2022. Both the war caused by the invasions of Russian troops in Ukraine and the sanctions against Russia resulted in supply chain and transport link disruptions and production losses for European companies. The Covid-19 pandemic was an opportunity for companies to build their supply chain resilience still the war in Ukraine resulted in new uncertainties and challenges. Problems were announced by all car producers in Europe.
This paper investigates the proactive and reactive measures applied by Czech and Hungarian automotive companies under the circumstances of the war in Ukraine. We apply the qualitative methodology and analyse interviews with companies‘ managers to learn about the applied measures. The results revealed that the resilience gained in the Covid-19 pandemic involves proactive measures that have been kept since then. The mainly discussed reactive measures are production replanning and alternative transportation. Adopting the multiple sourcing strategy in the automotive sector is limited and reactive rather than proactive. The important antecedent of agility is information sharing and cooperation inside the multinationals.

d'Artis Kancs (p)

Gábor Túry

Motivated by the recently experienced systemic shocks (the COVID-19 pandemic and the full-fledged Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine) – that have created new forms of uncertainties to our supplies – this paper explores the supply chain robustness under risk aversion and ambiguity aversion. We aim to understand the potential consequences of deeply uncertain systemic events on the supply chain resilience and how does the information precision affect individual agents’ choices and the chain-level preparedness to aggregate shocks. Augmenting a parsimonious supply chain model with uncertainty, we analyse the relationship between the upstream sourcing decisions and the supply chain survival probability. Both risk-averse and ambiguity-averse individually-optimising agents’ upstream sourcing paths are efficient but can become vulnerable to aggregate shocks. In contrast, a chain-level coordination of downstream firm sourcing decisions can qualitatively improve the robustness of the entire supply chain compared to the individual decision-making baseline. Such a robust decision making ensures that in the presence of an aggregate shock – independently of its realisation – part of upstream suppliers will survive and the final goods’ supply will be ensured even under the most demanding circumstances. Our results also indicate that an input source diversification extracts a cost in foregone efficiency.

Guillermo Peña (p)

d'Artis Kancs

This paper provides a general theory that homogenizes different economic flows as spatial trade (commerce), temporal trade (finance), human capital flows (migrations) or goods and services flows (sales and purchases) in a unique, simple but useful, economic model of Spatial-Temporal Gravity Equilibrium. Based on recent gravity models and the Reilly’s law, this theory proposes a cardinal utility function that, considering interests and transport costs, leads to an equation that is, to the author knowledge, the closest theoretical derivation of the Newton’s gravity law in Economics. By considering an ideal relationship between the two flows with opposite monetary direction, the share of this ideal flow over the two others is equal, according to the derivations of the proposed theory, to twice the product of the two stock variables associated to the two flows over the sum of both, divided by the square of the distance whether there is any spatial difference or divided by the maturity or time is there is any temporal difference in both flows.

Yuri Mansury (p)

Guillermo Peña

While conflict pervades virtually every aspect of society, there have been relatively few crossovers between Regional Science and Peace Science. This paper pays tribute to Walter Isard, pioneer of peace science research, and Kieran Donaghy, who has contributed to research on arms race dynamics and macroeconomic stability. I first review studies that examine the impact of (i) international trade on militarized conflict, (ii) the economy on militarized disputes, and (iii) conflict on macroeconomic stability. The analysis develops a structural equation model (SEM) to test the hypotheses simultaneously using the Correlates of War panel data. Consistent with the liberal proposition, I found that the pacifying effect of trade is robust across alternative SEM specifications. Controlling for standard explanatory variables, the SEM estimates reveal that the indirect impact of economic development on conflict mediated by trade is statistically significant at the 0.1-percent level. Trade is, therefore, a critical intervening variable that transforms conflict-inducing economic expansion into a pacifying influence on militarized disputes. The spatial version of the SEM confirms that democracies do not attack each other. While trade does not appear to have a local spillover effect on conflict, proximity to neighboring democracies does lead to fewer conflicts. The final hypothesis argues that conflict affects national economic performance, which Donaghy refuted in his 1995 Conflict Management and Peace Science paper. Consistent with Donaghy’s finding, the estimates reject the claim that conflict disrupts economic stability.