Macro-Level Resilience in Global Sourcing: A Framework for Modeling Trade Policy Risks and Concentration Vulnerabilities

Abstract

Global sourcing architectures that emerged through three decades of trade liberalization, production fragmentation, and logistics cost reduction have confronted, over the past five years, a sustained reconfiguration of the economic, political, and regulatory conditions on which they were premised. Pandemic-era supply disruption, geopolitical realignment centered on great-power competition and regional conflicts, accelerating industrial policy activism in the United States, European Union, and several major Asian economies, climate-related physical disruption, and the emergence of technology-focused trade restrictions have collectively produced a sourcing environment in which concentration vulnerabilities and trade policy risks operate with a salience that pre-pandemic frameworks substantially underweighted. This paper develops a conceptual framework for macro-level resilience in global sourcing that treats concentration and policy exposure as first-order determinants of sourcing strategy rather than as peripheral considerations. Drawing on the literatures of international economics, global value chains, production network analysis, supply chain risk and resilience, trade policy, and industrial policy, the paper argues that the firm-level sourcing practice discussed in the preceding companion literature must be supplemented with a macro-structural analysis that situates firm sourcing decisions within the evolving architecture of global production. The framework is organized around four analytical capabilities: concentration mapping across sourcing geographies, tiers, and suppliers; trade policy risk modeling across classical tariff, non-tariff, sanctions, and investment dimensions; scenario-based resilience analysis that combines the first two capabilities into assessments of exposure under alternative macro trajectories; and strategic diversification governance through which the analytical outputs become sourcing actions. The paper positions this framework as a synthesis of existing scholarship rather than an empirical validation of any specific sourcing program.