Dalia Marin
Global supply chains are being rewritten under pressure from tariffs, geopolitical shocks, and cheaper industrial robots. Leadership teams that built a decade of margin on low-cost offshoring now face a harder question: which parts of the production network are still worth holding abroad, and which need to come back. Most boards are making that call on instinct, without the economic evidence to weight the trade-off.
Dalia Marin is Chair in International Economics at the Technical University of Munich and a Bruegel fellow whose research helps companies and policymakers read the structural forces reshaping global supply chains.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Dalia Marin
- Her peer-reviewed research links automation, trade-policy uncertainty, and reshoring in a single empirical model, giving leadership teams a defensible basis for supply-chain decisions rather than a narrative.
- She translates between the Brussels and Berlin policy worlds and the corporate boardroom, drawing on advisory work with the European Commission, the EBRD, and the IMF.
- Her Project Syndicate column is a running public reference point on deglobalisation, German deindustrialisation, and the labour-market consequences of AI, read by policy and business readers across Europe.
- She is one of the few senior economists who has tracked the German industrial model, and the Eastern European production network around it, continuously since the 1990s. That long view matters when companies are re-assessing the same geographies.
Biography highlights
- Chair in International Economics, TUM School of Management, Technical University of Munich.
- Non-resident Fellow at Bruegel and Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research.
- Former Professor of International Economics at Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich (1998 to 2017).
- Co-editor of “The Organization of Firms in a Global Economy” (Harvard University Press, 2008) with Elhanan Helpman and Thierry Verdier.
- Co-author of “Global Value Chains in a World of Uncertainty and Automation”, Journal of International Economics, 2025.
- Visiting appointments at Harvard, Stanford, NYU Stern, the IMF, the NBER, and the European University Institute.
- Project Syndicate columnist on deglobalisation, industrial policy, and the future of the German economic model.
Biography
The reshoring debate has moved past the slogan stage. Firms are actually pulling production back to high-income economies, and the economic literature is starting to explain why. Trade-policy uncertainty and cheaper industrial robots, working together, are restructuring global supply chains in ways that a decade of offshoring logic did not anticipate.
That is the core argument of Marin’s recent work, co-authored in the Journal of International Economics in 2025. Her research shows that exposure to uncertainty in developing-country suppliers pushes production back to high-income countries, but only where robots have made it economically feasible. For a senior operations or strategy audience, this is a usable frame: reshoring is not a political mood, it is a measurable response to two forces that can be modelled.
The wider body of work runs through Bruegel, CEPR, and a sustained Project Syndicate column. She has written continuously on the German economic model, the Eastern European production network built around it, and the inflationary and labour-market consequences of a partial retreat from globalisation. Her advisory work with the European Commission, the EBRD, and the IMF sits alongside the academic record rather than replacing it.
She was Chair in International Economics at Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich for almost two decades before moving to TUM. Visiting appointments at Harvard, Stanford, NYU Stern, the IMF, and the NBER place her inside the network of economists who set the terms of the trade-policy debate. The value for a corporate audience is that she can connect that technical conversation to the question actually on the table: what does the next decade of supply-chain strategy look like when the old globalisation assumptions no longer hold.
Key speaking topics
- Deglobalisation and the restructuring of global supply chains
- Automation, robots, and reshoring
- The German economic model and European competitiveness
- International trade policy and geopolitical risk
- Multinational firms and the organisation of global production
- Industrial policy in Europe and the United States
- Inflation, labour markets, and the economics of deglobalisation
Ideal for
- Boards and executive committees reassessing supply-chain footprint in light of tariffs, geopolitical risk, and automation
- CSOs, Heads of Strategy, and COOs responsible for manufacturing and sourcing decisions in industrial and export-led businesses
- Policy forums, investor conferences, and economic summits focused on Europe, Germany, and the future of global trade
- Senior leadership in financial institutions and multinational corporates with significant exposure to Eastern Europe and the German industrial base
Audience outcomes
- A clear read of the empirical evidence on reshoring, automation, and trade-policy uncertainty, rather than the headline narrative
- A sharper view of where the German economic model is strong and where it is exposed, with implications for anyone doing business across the European industrial network
- A working framework for assessing which parts of a supply chain are candidates for reshoring and which are not
- A grounded perspective on the macro-economic consequences of deglobalisation, including effects on inflation and labour markets
- Language and evidence that senior leaders can use in their own board conversations on geopolitical and trade exposure