Supply Chain Managers Fear Protectionism
15th April 2009 by Alex Briggs1 Comment
Supply chain managers in North America, Europe and Asia by a wide margin worry that increasing trade protectionism could push the global recession into a global depression, according to a survey by BDP International, a Philadelphia-based supply chain management company.
According to BDP, 80 percent of survey respondents expressed concern the adverse effects of nations’ protectionist policies, resulting in a significant drop in export activity within their own companies.
By a margin of 81 percent, logistics executives also said that their top near-term priority was re-evaluating and lowering their transportation costs, according to the survey.
Managers would be making “cost-based choices” between truck, rail and water for domestic transportation, and air or ocean carriers for international shipments. They also said they intended to re-negotiate transportation contracts that were no more than a few months old, to reflect current supply-and-demand conditions, BDP said.
24th April 2009 at 7:26 am
I feel that this recession is going to change the whole economic equation. Exporting countries will realize that depending too much on counsumption of US and Europe could be risky. New markets will be explored and more focus will be on increasing domestic consumption within the country. This transormation will be extremely painful. Till the time the new scenarios emerge nations will resort to protectionist policies to protect local industries and insulate them from external competition which will finally lead to focus on generating domestic demand.
http://scmedge.blogspot.com/2008/10/global-recession-are-we-becoming-wiser.html