Ecosystem Transitivity: Policy Options

Agents (e.g., people), objects (e.g., sensors), and organizations (e.g., businesses) are highly interdependent in nations, resulting in high ecosystem transitivity, which enables cascading failures leading to economic disruption. Despite the criticality of ecosystem transitivity, few relevant national policies exist. In this article, we take an object-oriented approach to analyzing ecosystem transitivity and propose national policy actions to manage. Specifically, we propose adopting an Extended Legal Entity Identifier (XLEI) and implementing mandatory enterprise reporting of dependencies to record and analyze transitivity. We also propose establishing a National Resilience Board responsible for reducing nationally significant transitivity, implementing "guard" transitivity, and promoting organizational robustness.