Wellbeing, VUCA(t), and BANI: The Unequal Human Burden of Global Disruption (A Formative-Vector Framework and Country-Year Panel Evidence, 2005–2022)

The acronyms VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity) and BANI (Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible) have organised much management and strategy discourse over the last decade, but they have rarely been operationalised in a way that lets them be tested against data. This paper proposes that the two should be understood dynamically rather than as competing acronyms: VUCA(t) as an external field of disruption (a common, time-varying load of financial, policy, and geopolitical shocks to which all national social systems are exposed, and which can strain their normal functioning), and BANI as a formative vector of failure modes whose appearance depends on whether disruption exceeds adaptive capacity. We construct a global VUCA(t) composite from financial-volatility, world-uncertainty, economic-policy-uncertainty, and geopolitical-risk indices (1998–2025), and combine it with World Happiness Report panel data on anxiety / negative affect, social support, healthy life expectancy, and confidence in national government for 160 countries from 2005 to 2022 (N = 2,126 country-years). Three contributions emerge in descending order of strength. The primary contribution is measurement-theoretical: BANI must be modelled as a formative vector rather than a reflective scale. This is grounded conceptually — brittleness, anxiety, nonlinearity, and incomprehensibility are structural, affective, dynamic, and epistemic phenomena respectively, and there is no theoretical reason to expect them to co-move as interchangeable indicators — and confirmed empirically by a model that yields strongly negative interactions with anxiety / negative affect as the dependent variable but a flat null with institutional distrust as the dependent variable. The secondary contribution is descriptive-empirical: low-capacity countries' anxiety / negative affect rose sharply during 2014–2022 while high-capacity countries' remained comparatively stable — a striking divergence that coincides with rising global VUCA. The tertiary contribution is conceptual-policy: wellbeing may function as adaptive infrastructure, with the relational form of capacity (social support) carrying more of the descriptive moderation than the biological form (healthy life expectancy). A clean year-by-year causal moderation by VUCA per se cannot be identified with global VUCA only; a capacity-specific linear-trend control absorbs the interaction, indicating the pattern is also consistent with a broader differential trend in low-capacity countries. The paper should therefore be read as a measurement frame and descriptive puzzle that establishes the empirical agenda for a follow-up paper using country-specific VUCA shocks to test the mechanism.