Working Paper: The Petit Supply Chain: Trends & Benefits

Radu Dumitrescu is a PHD Candidate at the University of Bucharest. He contributes to the publication of various magazines, such as the web magazine of the Young European Federalists and The Political Science Club, and was one of the youngest nominees for the European Press Prize 2019. With his background in comparative politics, he also gained experience in the public sector, e.g. in the presidential office of the 2020 Charlemagne Prize laureate Klaus Iohannis. During the fellowship, he investigated the opportunities of shorter supply chains for the competitiveness of the EU, explicitly taking into account Eastern European locations. The aim was to address possibilities for crisis-proof trade mechanisms and to demonstrate the advantages of diversified production within the European community of values, away from non-transparent or undemocratic systems.

This first milestone report of the 2020/2021 Fellowship programme by our Fellow Radu George Dumitrescu presents the latest trends and the reasons for which companies move their production and manufacturing capabilities outside of Europe.

It argues that the COVID-19 pandemic marks an opportunity for Western European manufacturers to return, to relocate their production capabilities closer to home, to shorten their supply chains from a global to a regional scale, to focus their productive capabilities in and preferentially source from the Central and Eastern European region. In this way, they can benefit from the upsides of offshoring – lower wages in particular – but also remain within the stabilising aura of the European Union, constructing more resilient supply chains that are geographically closer to their home country and which can therefore bear shocks like those of the pandemic.