Rethinking Economic Stability: Temporal Coordination and Misalignment in Political Economy
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Abstract
This article examines how temporality shapes economic coordination, development, and governance in the contemporary global economy. While recent crises—such as financial instability, supply chain disruptions, and ecological stress—are often explained as failures of markets or institutions, this study argues that they reflect a deeper structural problem: misalignment between financial, industrial, infrastructural, and ecological time.
Existing literature on development, infrastructure, and global production networks provides important insights but remains fragmented and pays limited attention to temporal coordination across systems. This article addresses this gap by proposing the framework of Temporal Political Economy, which conceptualizes economic stability and development as outcomes of alignment or misalignment between multiple temporal systems.
Methodologically, the study adopts a theory-building approach based on comparative structural analysis and interdisciplinary synthesis. It develops three key concepts: temporal misalignment, rhythmic equilibrium, and temporal sovereignty.
The findings suggest that instability arises when short-term financial cycles dominate long-term processes, while stability depends on the coordination of multiple temporal horizons. Artificial intelligence is conceptualized as temporal infrastructure that accelerates and synchronizes economic processes, generating new forms of inequality and governance challenges.
The article contributes to political economy by introducing temporality as a structural dimension of economic coordination and by providing a framework for understanding development and stability as problems of temporal governance.
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