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Hello and welcome to the programme.

Now, imagine a situation where, for some extraneous reason,

everybody with a garden suddenly has extra time to spend there

and develops an abrupt desire to grow some new plants.

So they go to the nursery to buy them. But facing all

that extra demand, it takes the nurseries a season or two to grow extra stock. So in the meantime,

there are plant shortages. That's a not unrealistic account of what happened in the lockdowns of the

last year. But it is just one

tiny example of a massive issue all over the world economy right now. What has been happening

is that the pandemic has led to unusual swings in demand, businesses have been lurching around

struggling to keep up, and shortages sometimes result. And add to that, of course,

there have been disruptions to supply and production, so more than ever, industries found

themselves hitting their production limits. You might have heard in the news talk of shortages

in industries from building materials to semiconductors. So what we'll do today is reflect on the issue of shortages more generally.

How easy is it for companies to ramp up production?

In the back of my mind, as we look at this, is the world of vaccines.

Billions of extra vaccine doses have been made in the last year, of course.

But then you think of all the other things that are needed in a vaccine, the glass vials,

just one piece of a supply chain that has had to crank up at rapid pace.

Well, I have two guests who've worked on the front line of managing production in everything

that goes into it in different industries.

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