Research project S4P/25/BE-SEDEP (Research action S4P)
As a small, highly open economy, Belgium is deeply embedded in global value chains. This global integration fuels its prosperity, but also creates economic vulnerabilities: disruptions abroad –from natural events to geopolitical tension – can generate critical shortages or price hikes at home. BE-SEDEP develops a robust framework to identify Belgium's strategic economic dependence, assess its resilience against shocks, and provide concrete policy recommendations. By integrating advanced trade and network analysis with economic modelling, this project aims to inform Belgian policymakers and support Belgium's alignment with the EU's Open Strategic Autonomy agenda. To achieve this goal, the project pursues three objectives.
The first objective is to assess and extend existing indicators of strategic dependence, tailored to the Belgian context.
We provide a detailed account of the intuition, strengths, and limitations of each product- and sector-level indicator currently proposed by the FPS Economy. We extend these indicators beyond direct imports to capture indirect trade flows, quantifying dependencies that run through intermediate suppliers and are invisible to standard measures. We then map product-level trade flows onto the strategic sectors defined in EU and Belgian Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) regulations, identifying where supply vulnerabilities concentrate. Linking these risks to global trade policy instruments, we provide policymakers with the necessary insights to protect Belgian economic interests against international shocks.
The second objective is to develop new indicators based on network analysis, incorporating supply chain complexity and substitutability.
This new class of measures comprises both product-level and country-level centrality and clustering measures. These measures provide additional insights into the strategic importance of goods not captured by current indicators. The centrality measures that we will develop are fully consistent with economic theory, hence allowing for quantitative policy and welfare analysis. In collaboration with the FPS Economy, we will select and calculate a set of composite indicators that map Belgium's exposure across imports, indirect trade, and the position of trading partners in the global product space.
The third objective is to support the analytical and policy capacity of the FPS Economy to foster cooperation between federal administration and international partners.
We will model multiple scenarios of supply-chain disruption arising from natural or geopolitical changes in the trade environment, and assess how Belgium's dependencies respond. This yields concrete, evidence-based recommendations for mitigating strategic dependencies and improving supply-chain resilience, and it deepens cooperation between the federal administration and international partners.
By turning trade and network data into theory-consistent, policy-ready indicators and disruption scenarios, BE-SEDEP gives policymakers the tools to anticipate vulnerabilities rather than react to them, protecting Belgian economic interests and reinforcing the EU's Open Strategic Autonomy.
