Economic resilience across scales and the joint role of household capabilities, market systems, and institutions in adaptation to systemic shocks

Economies today face shocks that rarely arrive alone, and their effects travel from households to markets and from markets to public finances. Research on economic resilience has grown quickly, yet it remains divided by discipline and by unit of analysis. We report a global systematic scoping review, with theory driven synthesis, of peer reviewed studies published between January 2000 and October 2026. Five bibliographic databases were searched, and reporting follows the PRISMA extension for scoping reviews. In all, 213 studies met the inclusion criteria. We charted the evidence across three levels, namely households and producers, markets and sectors, and macroeconomies and institutions, and across four outcomes, namely resistance, recovery, adaptation, and transformation. Three findings stand out. Resilience is measured in ways that are seldom comparable. Shocks travel between levels through prices, production networks, credit, and public budgets. And the same resource can protect at one level while failing at another. Diversification, liquidity, insurance, market integration, and institutional quality are the mechanisms with the most consistent support, but how much they protect depends on whether a shock strikes a single household or an entire region. Credible causal evidence is concentrated on households and on natural disasters, while cross level effects and transformation remain thinly studied. We propose an integrated framework that links shock characteristics, vulnerability, adaptive resources, economic interdependence, and institutional conditions to resilience outcomes, derive testable propositions from it, and set out an agenda for more comparable measurement and stronger identification.