World Dynamics with Memory: A Multiscale State-Space Model for International Political Economy

International political economy (IPE) possesses sophisticated theories ofdomestic preference formation,state power, global markets, transnational networks, institutional change, and historical development, but these theories rarely occupy a common dynamic architecture. This paper develops a multiscale statespace framework—World Dynamics with Memory (WDM)—that treats households, firms, organizations, and elites as micro-level actors; state–economy complexes as mesoscopic systems; and world markets, transnational networks, rule regimes, and material-ecological constraints as macro-level structures. National economies are therefore macro systems internally but mesoscopic units globally. The model adds an explicit historical-memory state, allowing debt, fixed capital, institutional routines, skills, identities, alliances, and ecological transformations to alter future transition probabilities. It defines structural power as the capacity to modify networks, rules, or the aggregation categories through which politicaleconomic reality is organized, and defines agency operationally as a state-dependent intervention that changes the probability distribution of future world states. An information-theoretic closure criterion distinguishes micro-level complexity that can be omitted from micro-level detail that remains consequential for macro outcomes. From this framework the paper derives propositions concerning granular elite power, synchronized mass agency, crisis as macro-closure failure, critical-juncture amplification, path dependence, institutional hysteresis, rule-mediated compounding, regime-specific coefficients, and the emergence of the world market as a genuine macro level. Existing evidence from global financial cycles, production and financial networks, leader transitions, and post-crisis persistence is consistent with several mechanisms, although it does not validate a single universal “world equation.” The framework is offered as a formal metatheory and research program for historical, networked, and power-centered IPE.