This paper examines how institutional belonging shapes long-term development by comparing Spain and Uruguay, two small democracies with similar historical endowments whose trajectories diverged sharply after the 1960s. While Spain integrated into dense European institutional architectures, Uruguay remained embedded within the Latin American governance regime, characterized by weaker coordination and lower institutional coherence. To assess how alternative institutional embeddings could have altered these paths, the study develops a generative counterfactual framework grounded in economic complexity, institutional path dependence, and a Wasserstein GAN trained on data from 1960-2020. The resulting Expected Developmental Shift (EDS) quantifies structural gains or losses from hypothetical re-embedding in different institutional ecosystems. Counterfactual simulations indicate that Spain would have experienced significant developmental decline under a Latin American configuration, while Uruguay would have achieved higher complexity and resilience within a European regime. These findings suggest that development is not solely determined by domestic reforms but emerges from a country's structural position within transnational institutional networks.

The disruption of supplies during the Covid-19 crisis has led to shortages but has also shown the adaptability of some companies, which have succeeded in adapting their production chains quickly to produce goods experiencing shortages: hydroalcoholic gel, masks, and medical gowns. These productive jumps from product A to product B are feasible because of the know-how proximity between the two classes of products. The proximities were computed from the analysis of co-exports and resulted in the construction of the product space. Based on the product space, as well as the customer-supplier relationships resulting from the input-output matrices, we propose a recommender system for companies. The goal is to promote distributed manufacturing by recommending a list of local suppliers to each company. As there is not always a local supplier for a desired product class, we consider the proximity between products to identify, in the absence of a supplier, a substitute supplier able to adapt its production tools to provide the required product. Our experiments are based on French data, from which we build a graph of synergies illustrating the potential productive links between companies. Finally, we show that our approach offers new perspectives to determine the level of territories' industrial resilience considering potential productive jumps.

Linear models are constrained where economic complexity is concerned. Economic complexity refers to the chunk of reality that is not explained well by theory or intuition. Economic complexity includes multiple discontinuities and multiple interactions between economic variables. Complexity also includes structural change. Some economic relations may be context-dependent, or path-dependent.