Supply chains haven't adjusted significantly because of pandemic: IMF official

WASHINGTON, April 22 (Xinhua) -- The evidence so far suggests that supply chains haven't adjusted significantly because of the COVID-19 pandemic, an International Monetary Fund (IMF) official has said, while noting that it's a little bit early to tell the exact impact.

"To be honest, so far the evidence that we have seen, the actual numbers that we see do not say that supply chains have adjusted significantly because of the pandemic," Helge Berger, IMF's China mission chief and assistant director in the Asia and Pacific Department, told Xinhua recently.

"Maybe a little bit early to see this, but it could also be that firms have come to the conclusion that this will be a short-term problem, relatively speaking, that doesn't on its own, require a major sudden adjustment of the way they organize production," he said.

The IMF official, however, noted that there are ongoing trends that the pandemic could have accelerated.

Berger said many firms over the last years have decided to bring production capacity from outside China into China. "These are firms who have come to the conclusion that it is more economical to produce inside (China), what is going to be a large future market," he continued.

Meanwhile, he noted that some other firms may have concluded that after the trade disputes, now there's a pandemic, there are also "risks" to have a very global, very decentralized setup of supply chains.

"And they may have decided to build more redundancies, to have alternatives producers lined up, that process I presume will also continue," said the IMF official.

Noting that there are "different forces" at work, with many older than the pandemic, Berger said it's a little bit early to say in which way exactly the pandemic has impacted supply chains.