Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, United States of America.
School of Complex Adaptive Systems, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2024 Jul 11;19(7):e0306893. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0306893. eCollection 2024.
Under economic globalization, countries are linked through trade and investments. This economic interdependence creates vulnerabilities. The indirect vulnerability induced by interdependent networks of trade and investments can put a country's economy at risk, but this risk has yet to be systematically quantified and investigated. In this paper, we developed the novel Potential Indirect Vulnerability Index (PIVI) to capture how interdependencies between networks of trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) may induce economic vulnerabilities. The model consisted of three main components: a target country (the importer of goods), an investing country (the exporter of FDI), and the intermediary countries that export commodities to the target country and receive FDI from the investing country, serving as conduits of the vulnerabilities caused indirectly by the investing country. The PIVI quantifies the indirect vulnerabilities based on the product of two fractions: 1) the dependency of the target country on commodities from each intermediary country; and 2) the dependency of each intermediary country on FDI from the investing country. We demonstrated the utility of PIVI by examining the US economy's vulnerability to China using 2019 trade and FDI data. Several Asian countries and a mix of agricultural products and raw materials were identified as conduits through which China could potentially influence the US economy. Vietnam was a sizeable risk because, while it has been a primary source of many US imports, it also received about 30% of its FDI from China. The US policy makers might opt to increase diversity in trade partners or to promote investment in countries such as Vietnam. We also applied the PIVI analysis to critical minerals, identifying cobalt, tungsten, and copper as the most vulnerability-inducing among them. PIVI is a flexible metric than can be aggregated and modified to provide a more nuanced and focused assessment of an economy's vulnerability.
在经济全球化背景下，各国通过贸易和投资相互联系。这种经济相互依存关系带来了脆弱性。贸易和外国直接投资（FDI）网络相互依存所带来的间接脆弱性可能会使一个国家的经济面临风险，但这种风险尚未得到系统的量化和研究。在本文中，我们开发了一种新的潜在间接脆弱性指数（PIVI），以捕捉贸易和外国直接投资（FDI）网络之间的相互依存关系如何可能引发经济脆弱性。该模型由三个主要部分组成：目标国（商品进口国）、投资国（FDI 出口国）和作为投资国间接脆弱性传导渠道的中间国（向目标国出口商品并从投资国接收 FDI 的国家）。PIVI 通过乘积两个分数来量化间接脆弱性：1）目标国对每个中间国商品的依赖程度；2）每个中间国对投资国 FDI 的依赖程度。我们通过使用 2019 年的贸易和 FDI 数据，检验了美国经济对中国的脆弱性，证明了 PIVI 的实用性。几个亚洲国家和农产品与原材料的混合体被确定为中国可能通过这些国家对美国经济产生潜在影响的渠道。越南是一个相当大的风险，因为尽管它一直是许多美国进口商品的主要来源国，但它也从中国获得了约 30%的 FDI。美国政策制定者可能会选择增加贸易伙伴的多样性，或促进对越南等国家的投资。我们还将 PIVI 分析应用于关键矿产，发现钴、钨和铜是最易引发脆弱性的矿产。PIVI 是一个灵活的指标，可以进行汇总和修改，以更细致和有针对性地评估一个经济体的脆弱性。
