How resilient was international trade to Covid-19? Insights from clusters of European countries

Abstract

The Covid-19 crisis spread worldwideat lightningspeed mainly due to the interconnectedness of today's economies as evidenced by major disruptions in international trade. This articleaims to assessthe possible shifts that coronavirus disease has triggered inthe trade activity of European countriesin two particularly affected sectors, that is foodand machinery and transport equipment. In this process, exploratory data analysis is conductedtoaccurately explain the patterns lying behind the observed variations in trade values. Furthermore, clusteranalysis is performedonthe sample of European countries by applying hierarchical and K-means clustering algorithms using Python's libraries. Byexamining clusters of countries with similar trade profiles, this article contributes to discussions on global value chains, and to which extent there is data-based evidence to indicate systemic changes and reconfiguration ofglobal production processes.