Globalisation has had undesirable effects on the labour standards embedded in the products we consume. This paper proposes an ex-ante evaluation of supply chain due diligence regulations, such as the EU Corporate Sustainable Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD). We construct a full-scale network model derived from structural business statistics of 30 million EU firms to quantify the likelihood of links to firms potentially involved in human rights abuses in the European supply chain. The 900 million supply links of these firms are modelled in a way that is consistent with multiregional input-output data, EU import data, and stylized facts of firm-level production networks. We find that this network exhibits a small world effect with three degrees of separation, meaning that most firms are no more than three steps away from each other in the network. Consequently, we find that about 8.5 percent of EU companies are at risk of having child or forced labour in the first tier of their supply chains, about 82.4 percent are likely to have such offenders at the second tier and more than 99.1 percent have such offenders at the third tier. We also profile companies by country, sector, and size for the likelihood of having human rights violations or child and forced labour violations at a given tier in their supply chain, revealing considerable heterogeneity across EU companies. Our results show that supply chain due diligence regulations that focus on monitoring individual buyer-supplier links, as currently proposed in the CSDDD, are likely to be ineffective due to a high degree of redundancy and the fact that individual company value chains cannot be properly isolated from the global supply network. Rather, to maximise cost-effectiveness without compromising due diligence coverage, we suggest that regulations should focus on monitoring individual suppliers.

This paper advances a dynamic rationale for competitiveness policy that focuses on an economy's ability to evolve in order to achieve high real incomes along with desired qualitative changes in the socio-economic system. It highlights that the ubiquitous "rationalities of failure", either of markets, governments, or systems, are rooted in a peculiar habit of accepting hypothetical perfect states as normative benchmarks. In contrast, competitiveness policy starts from the objectives that the system wants to achieve. By combining the structuralist ontology of the micro, meso and macro levels of development with the basic system functions of evolutionary change, a general typology is developed that differentiates, organizes, and integrates various economic policies according to their respective contributions to the evolvability of the system. Among other advantages, the proposed concept of competitiveness policy allows (i) to replace the negative "logic of failure" with the active pursuit of dynamic development goals, (ii) to break the ideologically afflicted dichotomy between "vertical" and "horizontal" policies and (iii) to better align the theoretical rationale with the actual perception of the societal purpose of public interventions by most policy agents.

This paper studies the direct and indirect trade volume and trade cost effects of uncertainty on international trade and economic welfare using a structural gravity framework for a panel of 97 developed and developing countries from 2000 to 2018. We find that the sign and magnitude of the effect depend on whether uncertainty originates from the importing or exporting country. Moreover, applying a cross-sectional gravity model, we show that an uncertainty shock directly reduces cross-border trade flows. The paper illustrates the suitability of the proposed modelling approach by means of two counterfactual scenario analyses in which we calculate the general equilibrium trade and welfare effects of uncertainty induced by the unexpected outcome of the Brexit referendum in 2016 and the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.