The shut-down of the real economy due to Covid 19, trade wars, refinery explosions, any number of headline events, all challenge the resilience of local, national, and world economies - their ability to adapt to or perhaps overcome, a shock to the economic environment. We propose to develop new methods and techniques for assessing the resilience of market economies with respect to real (as opposed to financial) shocks.
There is a large literature addressing financial fragility, the propagation of financial shocks through a financial market system. Resilience and fragility on the real side of the economy, having to do with shocks to productive capacity or stocks of necessary inputs, is surprisingly understudied. Indeed, among economists there is little agreement, or even discussion, of what "resilience'' and "fragility" might mean. New theoretical and empirical methods for assessing resilience of market economies with respect to real shocks will be developed.