Supply-chain-aware input–output tables: reintroducing wholesale and retail flows

The COVID-19 pandemic and the Suez Canal blockage have shown how disruptions to wholesalers, retailers, and logistics intermediaries can ripple across entire economies. Yet the input–output (IO) tables commonly used to study such cascading effects abstract these intermediaries away: they record only the margins charged by traders, not the products flowing through them. We develop a method to reintroduce these wholesale and retail flows into national IO tables, using Eurostat data calibrated against Austrian trade statistics. The resulting supply-chain IO (SC-IO) tables cover 22 European countries over 2011–2020, preserve national accounting identities, and align more closely with firm-level business statistics than standard IO tables. Applied to a hypothetical disruption of food wholesaling in Austria, they yield economic loss estimates several times larger than standard IO tables. The SC-IO tables provide a building block for resilience analysis, agent-based modeling, and policy assessment of trade and logistics disruptions.