Forecasting Systemic Reconfiguration in Concentrated Global Supply Networks for Economic Resilience: A Systems-Theoretic Hypergraph-Structured Temporal Decision-Support Framework

Abstract

Concentrated sourcing is a structural property of the world economy rather than an occasional accident: across 168 national economies and 1118 four-digit product markets reconstructed from harmonized cross-border flow records, 27.7% of macro-level economy–product supply systems draw more than half of their imports from a single origin and 19.3% are critically dependent. Treating each such market as a system rather than as a set of bilateral links changes what can be asked of it, and this paper specifies the economy–product supply system in systems-engineering terms—boundary, elements, internal relations, external environment, state and state transition—and represents it as a time-evolving hyperedge over source countries. Three coupled questions follow, answered jointly by HyperSRM: which dependency state a system will occupy next year, whether it will diversify, reconcentrate, hold, or merely substitute one origin for another, and which origins are most consistent with the observed conditions preceding a material entry. Shared country and product embeddings support two temporal set-encoding branches, a candidate-conditioned branch for origin ranking and a candidate-free branch for state and mode forecasting, a sign-constrained gravity–capability–connectivity prior supplies an observational plausibility score with end use and maritime reachability as its context, and risk weights derived from the state head direct effort toward the most exposed systems. Developed on CEPII BACI, rebuilt independently on Eurostat Comext and audited against U.S. Census data at the level of the labels themselves, the framework returns calibrated state probabilities and a ten-origin shortlist that captures 58.1% of the following year’s risk-weighted material-entry mass and is accompanied by explicit out-of-pool diagnostics. These outputs describe the import-sourcing layer of resilience and are intended for analytical triage rather than a complete assessment of supply resilience. Three system-level regularities carry beyond the model: the arrival of a new origin is a weak proxy for diversification, critical dependency is close to absorbing for specified intermediate inputs but not for final goods, and the 2020–2021 contraction rearranged source sets without widening them—so resilience monitoring built on source counts misreads the direction of change.