Recent U.S. trade policy has renewed attention to global trade shocks and supply-chain relocation, especially in manufacturing. Through a Taiwan lens, this talk presents Professor Hsiao-Hui Lee's research on how shocks propagate not only through trade flows (physical goods) but also through financial flows—specifically, trade credit—within supply-chain networks. Professor Lee show that credit-chain linkages are a meaningful transmission channel, with within-country propagation (e.g., inside the United States) generally stronger than cross-border transmission. Against this backdrop, sourcing options—reshoring, nearshoring, and friendshoring—offer distinct benefits and trade-offs. A frequently overlooked consideration is trade-credit interdependence: the tight payables–receivables ties that can accompany reshoring, nearshoring, or friendshoring may magnify the transmission of shocks. The politics of relocation often oversimplify this complex problem; this additional financial-linkage risk should be weighed carefully when evaluating supply-chain reconfiguration decisions.

Speaker:

Hsiao-Hui Lee is a Distinguished Professor of Management Information Systems at the National Chengchi University. She received her Ph.D. in Operations Management from the Simon School at Rochester University, where she examined issues in service and healthcare areas using stochastic models. Her current research interests switched to empirical operations management in the context of supply chains, innovation, CSR, and IT. Her work has been published in leading journals, such as Management Science, Operations Research, M&SOM, ISR, POM, and Review of Economics and Statistics. She also serves as an AE at M&SOM and Decision Sciences, and a SE at Decision Support Systems.