Blog Post
Social Spillover Effects in the EU's Textile Supply Chains
Nov 23, 2020
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted by all United Nations (UN) member states in 2015, call on all nations to combine economic prosperity, social inclusion, and environmental sustainability. Spillover effects, in the form of positive or negative effects of a country’s actions on other countries, can facilitate or hinder a country’s SDG agenda. In this policy brief, SDSN and GIZ analyse such spillover effects, focussing specifically on fatal accidents and non-fatal accidents in the context of the textile supply chain. We assess textile products (including clothing, leather) that are sourced by the European Union (EU) from countries worldwide for meeting the demands of its citizens. To this end, we employ a well-established technique called multi-regional input-output analysis, featuring information on 15,000 sectors for 189 countries, to scan international supply chain routes that are linked to consumption of textile products by EU countries. Our findings suggest that Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Poland, Belgium and Portugal are collectively responsible for about 80% of both fatal- and non-fatal accidents that are attributed to the EU’s consumption-based footprint. These findings not only call for a need for coherent SDG policies that consider spillover effects, but that these effects need to be included in EU’s strategic instruments and policy-related tools.
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