Review about the "Free exchange | Location, location, location" from the "The Economist December 19th 2020."

  This review essay may contain some errors about the objective truth. Also, this review essay is completely written by myself. Therefore might have a biased opinion. Please tell me if this essay includes some errors about the objective truth. Also, I like to hear your idea about my opinion. Please leave them on the comment. 

This article is about the free exchange and reshoring of the companies and factories caused by several different global events including the Coronavirus pandemic. 

In modern days, many supply-chain managers have a lot to think about their supply chain since the world's trading environment had changed a lot. 

Sino-American trade war and pandemic caused by Covid19 were the most powerful reason that changed the world's trade environment followed by Brexit. 

In April, a survey conducted by EY concluded that 83% of the multinational executives were contemplating to do "reshoring" or the "nearshoring". Since the trade war and pandemic made the world's supply chain pretty unstable. 

Also, arise of 3D printing technology will make low-paying simple works can be done without human power. In 2017, a report by ING, a bank, predicted that 40% of the trade flow will be wiped out by the 3D printing technology. 

But of course, there are some opposite reasons and events that dispute the opinion written above. A survey and study about the German manufacturers and OECD reported that the effect of reshoring of the national scale is quite limited. 

Also, about 3D printing, a study about the hearing-aid industry dispute the decline of the world trade chain. In a decade, trade of hearing-aid industry increased 58% due to the low transport cost and cheap manpower of the developing countries. 

In this example, the advance in technology can stimulate importing rather than reshoring.

Also, the rise of the tariffs in America and elsewhere of the past four years should be a gamechanger of the global supply chain. However, even though America's imports from the 14 Asian countries decreased, there was no offsetting increase of the domestic gross of the manufacturing production. 

Consequently, many big events that predicted as the trigger of the global production chain did not become the trigger. Also, the global supply chain became stronger and predicted to be stronger. 

In my opinion, the daily wage of the people from developing countries is still very low due to many reasons including social and political reasons, many factories will no longer reshore since the pay gap is very huge. Also, the supply chain of modern days is very complicated due to the requirement of many resources and human power to create such sophisticated or immense amounts of products. 

Thank you.