Abstract
In light of about 80% of international freight traffic carried by sea, maritime supply chains’ stability is pivotal to global connectivity. For over a year now, the transboundary mobility of vessels and cargoes has been restricted by diverse forms of the COVID-19 containment measures applied by national governments, while the lockdowns of people, businesses, and economic activities have significantly affected the growth prospects of various maritime connectivity initiatives. This study investigates how the pandemic-related public health, trade, and market factors have shifted the connectivity patterns in the Polar Silk Road (PSR) transport corridor between China, South Korea, Japan, Russia, and four economies of Northern Europe. The causality links between the Shipping Connectivity Index (SCI) and the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths, trade volumes with China and the rest of the world, and price indexes of minerals, fuels, food, and agricultural products are revealed separately for eight countries and thirty-five ports. The study algorithm is built on the consecutive application of the Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) and the Phillips-Perron (PP) stationarity tests, the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) method, the Fully-Modified Ordinary Least Squares (FMOLS) and the Dynamic Ordinary Least Squares (DOLS) robustness checks, and the Toda-Yamamoto causality test. Tight trade-connectivity links are recorded in all locations along the China-PSR transport corridor in 2015–2019, but in 2020, the relationships weakened. Bidirectional influences between the number of COVID-19 cases and connectivity parameters demonstrate the maritime sector’s sensitivity to safety regulations and bring into focus the role of cargo shipping in the transboundary spread of the virus. The authors’ four-stage approach contributes to the establishment of a methodology framework that may equip stakeholders with insights about potential risks to maritime connectivity in the China-PSR maritime trade in the course of the pandemic.
Highlights
In just a few months, the COVID-19 outbreak has turned upside down most kinds of economic activities and everyday interactions between people, businesses, and countries
Possible consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic to maritime connectivity are addressed as changes in causality linkages between variables in the 2020 model compared to the 2015–2019 model
Both the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) analysis and the TY causality test show that the COVID-19 outbreak can be associated with monthly changes in the Shipping Connectivity Index (SCI) scores that have been observed by the UNCTAD [1], research and statistics entities [112,113,114], and many scholars worldwide [16,115,116,117]
Summary
In just a few months, the COVID-19 outbreak has turned upside down most kinds of economic activities and everyday interactions between people, businesses, and countries. By the first quarter of 2020, the disease had emerged from a health issue to a complex of economic and social problems, almost stopping travel and transboundary mobility and causing unprecedented lockdowns and other painful disruptions to supply chains and global trade [1]. At about the same time, the International Energy Agency [3] reported that nearly 54% of the global population was affected by restrictions to mobility and other forms of social activities and mass gatherings [4]. Since the bulk of intercountry freight traffic is accounted for by maritime transport [1,8], the Sustainability 2021, 13, 3521.
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