Dashboard reveals GVC risks for monetary, financial stability

Global value chains (GVCs) are poorly understood at a granular level, obscuring vulnerabilities with direct implications for growth, inflation, and financial stability.

Recent shocks like the Covid-19 pandemic highlighted this lack of transparency, as aggregate statistics fail to capture intricate firm-to-firm relationships.

Project Insight, a collaboration between the BIS, HKMA, OECD, and DIW Berlin, addresses this gap by developing a proof-of-concept (PoC) dashboard.

Leveraging historical, granular supply chain data from 2018 to 2024, the project integrates commercial data on firm-to-firm activity with public macroeconomic information.

This data is transformed into harmonised GVC metrics covering cross-sectional and time series trends, trade exposure, concentration risks, resilience, bottlenecks, and network centralities.

These metrics span multiple layers of granularity, from entity-to-entity up to economy-to-economy levels, supporting both high-level monitoring and detailed analytical exploration for central banks and policymakers.

Monitoring global value chains (GVCs) currently faces significant gaps, particularly at the granular firm level.

Publicly available data, like customs-based trade and balance of payments statistics, offer aggregate insights but fail to capture intricate firm-to-firm relationships.

These official statistics are often limited to single jurisdictions, feature varying publication delays, and omit critical domestic trade flows, providing only a partial picture.

Both firms and policymakers often lack visibility into indirect exposures further up or down their supply chains.

This opacity can mask important macroeconomic details, as shocks propagate through these complex networks in ways aggregate data cannot reveal, hindering the tracking of concentration risks and vulnerabilities impacting financial and monetary stability.