# Page 1 APPLICATA — CENTRE FOR STRATEGIC SOLUTIONS Bishkek, Kyrgyz Republic · Foundational Working Paper INFRANOMICS The Foundational Economic Stratum A Canonical Definition with Operational Index Kubatbek K. Rakhimov Applicata — Centre for Strategic Solutions, Bishkek ORCID: 0000-0003-3756-9375 Working Paper: WP-INF-2026-01 (revised) Date: May 2026 Language: English (with Russian abstract) Methodological standard: Applicata Preprint Workflow v1.0 Contact: kubat.rakhimov@gmail.com # Page 2 CITATION Rakhimov, K.K. (2026). Infranomics: The Foundational Economic Stratum — A Canonical Definition with Operational Index. Applicata Working Paper WP-INF-2026-01 (revised). Bishkek: Applicata — Centre for Strategic Solutions. PRIORITY NOTICE This working paper contributes four distinct elements to the literature on the political economy of infrastructure: (1) It introduces a stratificational concept of Infranomics — as the lower economic stratum of a three-tier political-economic architecture — distinct from the systems-engineering concept of Infranomics introduced by Gheorghe and Masera (2010, 2014), to which the author acknowledges priority of the term. The two concepts share the name but address different problems. (2) It formalizes four constitutive features of the infranomic stratum — physical-territorial anchoring, structural power not reducible to market value, coercion of dependency, and sub- economic financing as constitutive — that together differentiate it from the classical economic stratum above it. (3) It introduces the Infranomic Sovereignty Index (ISI), a four-axis operational instrument for assessing the degree of infranomic sovereignty held by a given polity across its critical infrastructure sectors. (4) It locates Infranomics within the author's broader research programme on the political economy of the multipolar transition, anchoring the subsequent treatments of Ultranomics (Rakhimov, 2026e) and quantum modulation (Rakhimov, 2026g). RELATED WORKING PAPERS Rakhimov, K.K. (2026a). Infrastructure Political Geography (IPG). Applicata Working Paper WP- IPG-2026-01. ssrn.com/abstract=6564659 Rakhimov, K.K. (2026b). Intergenerational Debt and the Parental Tax. Applicata Working Paper WP-2026-02. ssrn.com/abstract=6550519 Rakhimov, K.K. (2026c). The AI Caste Hypothesis. Applicata Working Paper WP-2026-03. ssrn.com/abstract=6564318 Rakhimov, K.K. (2026d). Infrapopulism: The Sovereignty-Without-Substance Pattern in Eurasian Infrastructure Politics. Applicata Working Paper WP-2026-05. ssrn.com/abstract=6726482 Rakhimov, K.K. (2026e). Ultranomics: The Apex Economic Stratum of the AI Era. Applicata Working Paper WP-2026-08. Rakhimov, K.K. (2026f). Layer Zero: Quantum Infrastructure as the Axis of the New Economic Order. Applicata Working Paper WP-2026-07. # Page 3 Rakhimov, K.K. (2026g). Quantum Modulation of Economic Strata. Applicata Working Paper WP- 2026-09. Rakhimov, K.K. (2026h). Water Sovereignty for Development (WSD). Applicata Working Paper WP-2026-06. ssrn.com/abstract=6726298 # Page 4 АННОТАЦИЯ Настоящая работа представляет каноническое определение Инфраномики — фундаментального экономического слоя, образующего нижний уровень трёхзвенной стратификации (инфраномика → классическая экономика → ультраномика), на которой строится исследовательская программа автора. Концепт многократно использовался в предшествующих работах, однако до сих пор не получал отдельной канонической формализации в виде самостоятельного текста. Настоящая работа закрывает этот методологический разрыв и одновременно отграничивает разрабатываемое здесь политэкономическое понимание Инфраномики от ранее существующего технико- инженерного концепта с тем же именем, введённого Gheorghe и Masera (2010, 2014). Инфраномика в политэкономическом смысле определяется как экономический слой, в котором физическая и физико-смежная инфраструктура (энергетические сети, транспортные системы, водные системы, телекоммуникации, центры обработки данных как физические объекты) функционирует как материальное основание всей последующей экономической активности, и чьи объекты обладают структурной властью, не сводимой к их рыночной стоимости. Инфраномика — не отрасль и не сектор; это нижний экономический уровень, на котором стоит классическая экономика, а через неё и ультраномический апекс. Слой конституируется четырьмя признаками: (1) физико-территориальная привязанность; (2) структурная власть, не сводимая к рыночной стоимости; (3) принуждение к зависимости; (4) субэкономическое финансирование как конститутивный признак. Совокупность этих признаков отграничивает Инфраномику от классического экономического стратума и обосновывает её как самостоятельную теоретическую категорию. Работа также вводит операциональный инструмент — Индекс Инфраномического Суверенитета (Infranomic Sovereignty Index, ISI) — четырёхосевую систему оценки степени инфраномического суверенитета, удерживаемого государством по каждому критическому инфраструктурному сектору. ISI оценивает четыре измерения по каждому сектору: контроль решений, локальное финансирование, технический стандарт, политическую преемственность. Инструмент применим без специальной подготовки и даёт сопоставимые между странами и между секторами профили. В заключительной части обсуждаются три макро-эффекта: переопределение суверенитета как инфраномического контроля; инфрапопулизм как предсказуемая политическая патология инфраномической зависимости; иерархия структурного обусловливания, при которой классическая экономика и ультраномика зависят от инфраномических предпосылок. Ключевые слова: инфраномика; фундаментальный экономический слой; структурная власть инфраструктуры; физико-территориальная привязанность; принуждение к зависимости; субэкономическое финансирование; Индекс Инфраномического Суверенитета (ISI); трёхзвенная стратификация; инфраструктурно-политическая география; инфрапопулизм; суверенитет как инфраномический контроль # Page 5 EXTENDED ABSTRACT This paper presents the canonical definition of Infranomics — the foundational economic stratum that constitutes the lower level of the three-tier stratification (Infranomics → Classical Economy → Ultranomics) on which the author's research programme is built. The concept has been repeatedly deployed in prior work, but has not until now received a separate canonical formalization. The paper closes this methodological gap and simultaneously demarcates the political-economic concept developed here from the prior systems-engineering concept of the same name introduced by Gheorghe and Masera (2010, 2014). Infranomics in the political-economic sense is defined as the economic stratum in which physical and physical-adjacent infrastructure — energy networks, transportation systems, water systems, telecommunications, datacenters as physical objects — operates as the material foundation of all subsequent economic activity, and whose objects possess a structural power not reducible to their market value. Infranomics is not an industry or a sector; it is the lower economic level upon which the classical economy stands, and through it the ultranomic apex. The stratum is constituted by four features: (1) physical-territorial anchoring; (2) structural power not reducible to market value; (3) coercion of dependency; (4) sub-economic financing as constitutive. Together these features differentiate Infranomics from the classical economic stratum and justify it as a distinct theoretical category. The paper also introduces an operational instrument — the Infranomic Sovereignty Index (ISI) — a four-axis system for assessing the degree of infranomic sovereignty held by a state across its critical infrastructure sectors. The ISI evaluates four dimensions per sector: decision control, local financing share, technical standard origin, and political transferability. The instrument is applicable without specialized training and produces profiles comparable across countries and across sectors. The paper differentiates Infranomics from five adjacent concepts: from infrastructure economics as a mainstream subfield (sectoral, not structural); from systems-engineering Infranomics in the Gheorghe-Masera sense (decision-methodology, not stratum); from Infrastructure Political Geography (IPG) as an applied analytical framework operating on the infranomic stratum; from geo-economics as a foreign-policy concept; and from infrastructure studies in critical theory traditions (Easterling, Larkin, Mitchell, Khalili) which capture important dimensions but do not develop infranomics as a structural-economic stratum. Five anticipated objections are addressed within the text. The concluding section discusses three macro-consequences: the redefinition of sovereignty as infranomic control; infrapopulism as the predictable political pathology of infranomic dependency; and the hierarchy of structural conditioning under which the classical economy and ultranomics both depend on infranomic prerequisites. Keywords: infranomics; foundational economic stratum; structural power of infrastructure; physical-territorial anchoring; coercion of dependency; sub-economic financing; Infranomic # Page 6 Sovereignty Index (ISI); three-tier stratification; infrastructure political geography; infrapopulism; sovereignty as infranomic control # Page 7 1. Introduction: The Foundational Stratum and the Definitional Gap Across the working papers, books, and articles that compose the author's research programme on the political economy of the multipolar transition, one term has been deployed with greater frequency than almost any other: Infranomics. It names the lower stratum of the three-tier model that organizes the programme's architecture; it underpins the analytical framework of Infrastructure Political Geography (Rakhimov, 2026a); it provides the structural condition that the infrapopulism diagnosis presupposes (Rakhimov, 2026d); it is the stratum that Water Sovereignty for Development applies to a specific resource and a specific region (Rakhimov, 2026h); and it is the foundation against which the apex stratum of Ultranomics (Rakhimov, 2026e) and the axial concept of Layer Zero (Rakhimov, 2026f) are positioned. Despite this pervasive use, the concept has not, until now, received a single canonical text in which it is defined, differentiated from adjacent concepts, operationalized through an applicable instrument, and structurally articulated. The various deployments of the term across the programme have proceeded on a tacit assumption — shared between the author and the readers — that Infranomics denotes a recognizable structural reality. That assumption has been productive but it has generated a methodological vulnerability: a research programme whose foundational category lacks a canonical definition is exposed to challenges of conceptual drift, internal inconsistency, and external misrepresentation. The present paper closes this gap. It provides the canonical definition that the programme has hitherto relied upon implicitly, demarcates it from five adjacent concepts (including, importantly, the prior systems-engineering concept of Infranomics introduced by Gheorghe and Masera, whose priority of the term the present author explicitly acknowledges), operationalizes it through the Infranomic Sovereignty Index (ISI), and anticipates five classes of objection that the concept is likely to encounter in academic and policy discussion. The argument proceeds in seven steps. Section 2 differentiates Infranomics from five adjacent concepts. Section 3 develops the four constitutive features of the stratum positively. Section 4 introduces the Infranomic Sovereignty Index. Section 5 examines the macro consequences of recognizing Infranomics as a distinct stratum. Section 6 anticipates and responds to five expected objections. Section 7 situates the canonical definition within the broader three-tier-plus-axis architecture and identifies the implications for ongoing and subsequent work in the programme. 2. What Infranomics Is Not As prescribed by the Applicata Preprint Workflow standard, the present paper begins its positive exposition with a systematic adjacency demarcation. The category of Infranomics is most efficiently introduced by distinguishing it from five adjacent concepts with which it is often, but incorrectly, identified. Each of these concepts captures something real and academically significant; none of them is structurally adequate as a designation of the foundational economic stratum that Infranomics names. # Page 8 2.1 Infranomics Is Not Infrastructure Economics The mainstream economic subfield of infrastructure economics — established by Aschauer (1989) and developed by a substantial subsequent literature — studies infrastructure as a category of capital investment with particular productivity effects, spillover externalities, and financing characteristics. It is a sectoral subfield: it asks how much return infrastructure investment generates, how that return distributes across the economy, and how infrastructure should be financed. The subfield operates within the assumptions of classical economic theory, treating infrastructure as one investment category among others within the classical economic stratum. Infranomics differs from infrastructure economics in this precise respect: it is not a sectoral subfield within classical economics but a structural designation of the stratum beneath classical economics. Where infrastructure economics asks how much return a road generates, Infranomics asks what kind of structural object a road is, such that economic activity at higher strata is conditioned by it. These are different questions belonging to different theoretical traditions. Infrastructure economics is an enormously useful body of work that this paper does not seek to displace, but it is not Infranomics, and the difference is not one of degree but of structural object. 2.2 Infranomics Is Not Systems-Engineering Infranomics (Gheorghe-Masera) The most direct and most important demarcation concerns the prior existence of a different concept bearing the same name. Adrian V. Gheorghe and Marcelo Masera introduced the term Infranomics in 2010 in the International Journal of Critical Infrastructures and elaborated it in their 2014 book Infranomics: Sustainability, Engineering Design and Governance (Springer). In their formulation, Infranomics is defined as a body of disciplines supporting analysis and decision- making regarding the metasystem of infrastructures, encompassing the totality of technical components, stakeholders, mindframes, and legal constraints. It is, in their words, a discipline-of- disciplines for the twenty-first century — a meta-disciplinary framework for engineering and policy decision-making about infrastructure systems. This prior concept is academically significant and is acknowledged in priority of the term. The present paper does not claim originality of the word Infranomics; it claims originality of a distinct concept that happens to share the name. The two concepts address different problems. The Gheorghe-Masera Infranomics is a systems-engineering decision-methodology — it asks how complex infrastructure systems should be analyzed and managed across their lifecycle. The present paper's Infranomics is a structural-economic concept — it asks what kind of stratum the infrastructure objects collectively constitute within an economic and political-economic architecture. The relationship between the two concepts is one of compatibility rather than competition. Gheorghe-Masera Infranomics operates at the level of practical engineering and policy analysis for infrastructure systems; the present paper's Infranomics operates at the level of political- economic theory situating the stratum within a broader architecture. Both can co-exist as legitimate uses of the term, distinguished by context — the former is referenced in engineering # Page 9 and complex-systems journals, the latter in political-economy and international-relations journals. Where ambiguity would arise, the present author will use the formulation political-economic Infranomics or stratificational Infranomics to disambiguate. The two streams of literature may, in time, productively converge — but they begin from different methodological positions and should not be conflated. 2.3 Infranomics Is Not Infrastructure Political Geography (IPG) A more subtle demarcation, internal to the author's own programme, is between Infranomics and Infrastructure Political Geography (Rakhimov, 2026a). The two concepts were developed in parallel and share much vocabulary, but they are not identical. IPG is an analytical framework for studying geopolitical projection through infrastructure objects: it asks how states use the construction, control, and capture of infrastructure to project power across territory. It is, in technical terms, a framework operating on the infranomic stratum, drawing tools from political geography, international relations, and strategic studies. Infranomics, by contrast, is the stratum itself. It is the broader structural-economic category that includes the dimensions IPG analyzes — geopolitical projection, territorial control, sovereignty implications — but also dimensions that IPG does not directly address: the accumulation regime of infranomic capital, the financing structure of infranomic investment, the relationship between infranomic objects and the classical economic activity built upon them, the inter-generational distribution of infranomic costs and benefits, and the conditions of inheritance of infranomic stocks across political regimes. IPG is to Infranomics as geo-economics is to the classical economy: one analytical lens applied to a stratum, but not the stratum itself. 2.4 Infranomics Is Not Geo-economics Geo-economics, as developed in the work of Blackwill and Harris (2016) and the substantial subsequent literature, is the use of economic instruments to advance foreign-policy objectives. It treats trade tariffs, sanctions, investment screening, currency policy, and other economic levers as instruments of strategic competition between states. Like infrastructure economics, geo- economics is internally coherent and useful, but operates at a different theoretical level than Infranomics. The difference is that geo-economics is an instrumentalist concept — concerning how states use economic tools — while Infranomics is a structural concept — concerning what kind of economic stratum exists beneath the classical level of markets and contracts. A geo-economic analysis of pipeline politics asks how a pipeline can be used as a sanctions tool; an infranomic analysis of the same pipeline asks what structural conditions the pipeline imposes on every actor whose economic activity depends on its operation. Both questions are legitimate and not mutually exclusive, but they do not belong to the same theoretical category. # Page 10 2.5 Infranomics Is Not Critical Infrastructure Studies A fifth adjacent body of literature requires demarcation: the rich tradition of critical infrastructure studies developed in anthropology, political theory, and science and technology studies. Easterling (2014) examines infrastructure as extrastatecraft and statecraft beyond the state; Larkin (2013) develops the politics and poetics of infrastructure; Mitchell (2011) analyzes how carbon infrastructure shapes democratic forms; Khalili (2020) traces shipping and port infrastructure within global capitalism. This literature captures dimensions that mainstream infrastructure economics misses and has produced some of the most penetrating analyses of contemporary infrastructure politics. Infranomics is indebted to this literature but is structurally distinct from it. Critical infrastructure studies typically operates as a critique of dominant infrastructure regimes from positions in cultural theory, anthropology, or political philosophy. Its mode is analytical and often genealogical. Infranomics is an economic theory of the stratum: it seeks to formalize the structural features that distinguish infranomic objects as a category of economic object, and it does so within a stratificational architecture relating to classical economic and ultranomic strata. Critical infrastructure studies illuminates the historical and political texture of specific infranomic regimes; Infranomics provides the structural-theoretical category within which those analyses can be located. 3. The Four Constitutive Features of Infranomics Having differentiated Infranomics from the concepts with which it might be confused, the paper now develops the four constitutive features of the stratum positively. Each feature is presented as a structural characteristic that distinguishes infranomic objects from the objects of the classical economic stratum above them. The four features are not independent variables but interlocking determinations of a single structural reality: the infranomic stratum is the set of economic objects that simultaneously exhibit all four. 3.1 Physical-Territorial Anchoring The first constitutive feature of Infranomics is the physical and territorial anchoring of its objects. An infranomic object is, by definition, located in physical space; it cannot be relocated, redomiciled, or financialized away from its territorial position without ceasing to be the object that it is. A pipeline crosses specific terrain; a power line traverses specific land; a port occupies specific coast; a datacenter sits on specific real estate connected to specific electricity supply and specific fibre routes. This feature distinguishes infranomic objects sharply from classical economic objects, many of which have become substantially deterritorialized in the era of financialization and globalization. A firm can move its headquarters; a financial instrument can be issued in any jurisdiction; intellectual property can be licensed to any subsidiary in any tax-favoured location. None of this is possible for an infranomic object. A pipeline cannot be moved to Luxembourg to optimize its taxation; a railway # Page 11 gauge cannot be redenominated in Swiss francs. The infranomic object remains where it was built, subject to the political authority that controls the territory through which it passes. This anchoring has the consequence that infranomic objects generate a particular kind of sovereignty exposure. The state on whose territory an infranomic object stands has powers over that object that no contract and no offshore arrangement can fully neutralize. This is a structural fact of infranomics, not a contingent feature of any particular legal system. It is the reason why infranomic disputes — over Nord Stream, over the Suez Canal, over Russian gas transit through Ukraine, over Chinese-controlled ports — escalate to the highest levels of inter-state confrontation in ways that disputes over financial instruments or intellectual property generally do not. 3.2 Structural Power Not Reducible to Market Value The second constitutive feature of Infranomics is that the value of an infranomic object is not adequately captured by its market price or its discounted cash flow. An infranomic object generates network effects, dependency relations, and political leverage that exceed the revenue it can extract from its direct users. The Suez Canal's commercial revenue is a fraction of its geopolitical importance; the Strait of Hormuz cannot be priced by tanker traffic alone; the rail network of a continent cannot be valued by ticket sales. Each of these objects has a strategic value that the market price of its services would systematically under-state. This is not merely an observation that infrastructure has externalities in the standard economic sense. Externalities are residual effects on third parties that price systems fail to internalize; the structural power of infranomic objects is more than this. It is a constitutive feature: the object exists precisely because it generates leverage that exceeds its commercial returns, and the actors who finance and control it — typically states or quasi-state actors — do so on the basis of the leverage rather than the returns. The classical economic question whether an investment is profitable is not the right question for infranomic objects. The right question is what structural position the investment creates. This feature has profound implications for theory and practice. The standard tools of investment appraisal — net present value, internal rate of return, cost-benefit analysis — are systematically inadequate for infranomic decisions because they price only the dimension that is commercially measurable, leaving the constitutive dimension of structural power outside the calculation. The recurrent finding that major infrastructure investments fail standard appraisal but proceed politically is not a market failure; it is a reflection of the fact that infranomic decisions are structurally extra-commercial. 3.3 Coercion of Dependency The third constitutive feature of Infranomics is that infranomic objects, once constructed, structurally impose dependency on every actor whose economic activity passes through them. The truck driver depends on the road; the manufacturer depends on the power grid; the household depends on the water network; the bank depends on the telecommunications system; the AI laboratory depends on the datacenter and its electricity supply. None of these dependencies is a # Page 12 market relationship in the standard sense. The downstream actor cannot easily choose an alternative infranomic supplier; the alternative often does not exist, or exists only at prohibitive cost, or exists only in territories controlled by different sovereign authorities. This is not the same as the dependence created by classical economic relationships such as supply chains, employment contracts, or financial obligations. Classical economic dependencies are typically reversible, substitutable, or renegotiable in market terms. Infranomic dependencies have a different character: they are enforced by the physical reality of the network and the path- dependent character of infrastructure standards. Once a continent has been built around a particular rail gauge, voltage, signalling protocol, or pipeline diameter, the dependency is locked in for generations. Switching is not a market choice; it is a multi-decade political-engineering project. Actors who control infranomic objects acquire coercive leverage over actors who depend on them, and this leverage operates independently of the price system. The leverage exists even when no price is being charged, even when the relationship appears commercially neutral, and even when the controlling actor has no immediate intention of exercising it. The leverage is structural, not transactional. It is therefore not subject to the moderating mechanisms that govern commercial relationships, and it explains a substantial share of the political conflict that surrounds infranomic objects globally. 3.4 Sub-Economic Financing as Constitutive The fourth constitutive feature of Infranomics is that infranomic objects systematically cannot be financed at market rates from private capital alone, which makes their financing structurally political rather than contingently so. The combination of high upfront capital intensity, long payback periods, uncertain revenue streams, and the structural-power dimension that the market does not price means that the rational private investor will systematically under-invest in infranomic objects relative to the level required by social or strategic optima. This is not a market failure to be corrected; it is a constitutive feature of the stratum. The infranomic stratum cannot exist at the scale required by modern economies on the basis of private-capital financing alone. It requires sovereign debt, state-owned enterprises, multilateral development bank lending, geopolitically-motivated financing (the Belt and Road Initiative being the largest contemporary example), or sustained tax-financed public investment. The structurally political character of infranomic financing means that infranomic decisions are inherently exposed to political considerations in a way that classical economic decisions are not. This feature has the consequence that infranomic objects are typically constructed and operated under hybrid governance regimes — neither fully private nor fully public, neither fully market- based nor fully political — and that the specific form of this hybrid governance is itself a substantive policy question with significant distributive and strategic consequences. The choice between a sovereign-financed national grid, a foreign-financed grid via geopolitically-tied lending, a public-private partnership, and a fully-privatized grid is not a technical financing choice; it is a foundational political choice that conditions the infranomic stratum of the economy for decades to come. # Page 13 4. The Infranomic Sovereignty Index (ISI) The preceding sections have developed Infranomics as a theoretical concept. The present section operationalizes that concept through an applicable instrument: the Infranomic Sovereignty Index (ISI). The instrument's purpose is to enable practitioners — policy analysts, government officials, academic researchers, and informed citizens — to assess the infranomic sovereignty position of a polity systematically and comparably, without requiring specialized methodological training. The Index is structured along four axes, derived from the four constitutive features of Infranomics developed in Section 3 and from the operational toolkit standard prescribed in the Applicata Preprint Workflow. Each axis is evaluated for each critical infranomic sector — typically energy, transportation, water, telecommunications, and datacenter infrastructure — and the resulting sector profiles are aggregated into a national infranomic sovereignty profile. 4.1 The Four Axes Axis 1: Decision Control. Who holds primary decision-making authority over the long-term development, modification, and operational direction of infrastructure in this sector? Scored on a three-point scale: full external control (0), shared or contested control (1), full sovereign control (2). External control includes foreign state ownership, foreign creditor-imposed conditionality, and operational dependence on foreign-domiciled technical providers. Axis 2: Local Financing Share. What proportion of capital expenditure on infranomic objects in this sector is sourced from local — sovereign or domestic-private — capital, as distinct from foreign sovereign lending, foreign private investment, or foreign concessional finance? Scored on a three- point scale: predominantly foreign (0), mixed (1), predominantly local (2). Axis 3: Technical Standard Origin. Are the technical standards governing infranomic objects in this sector locally developed, regionally adopted, or imported from external standard-setting bodies? Scored on a three-point scale: fully imported standards (0), partially adapted standards (1), locally or regionally originated standards (2). Axis 4: Political Transferability. Can primary control over infranomic objects in this sector be transferred to a successor political authority — through normal democratic transition, through legitimate succession, or through contracted operational handover — without loss of functional capacity? Scored on a three-point scale: full lock-in to current authority or to external operators (0), partial transferability (1), full transferability without functional loss (2). Each axis is scored from 0 to 2 per sector; the sector total is 0–8. The five sectors (energy, transportation, water, telecommunications, datacenters) yield a national ISI total ranging from 0 to 40. National ISI profiles are interpreted both as aggregate scores and as sector-by-axis matrices that reveal specific patterns of dependency. # Page 14 4.2 Applied Example: A Hypothetical Mid-Sized Eurasian Economy The instrument is illustrated through a hypothetical application to a mid-sized Eurasian economy. The illustration is deliberately stylized rather than empirical, to demonstrate the instrument's logic without committing to specific country claims that would require separate empirical verification. Sector Control Financing Standard Transfer Sector Total Energy (gas, oil, electricity) 1 0 1 1 3 / 8 Transportation (rail, road, pipelines) 1 1 1 1 4 / 8 Water (supply, treatment, transboundary) 2 1 1 2 6 / 8 Telecommunications 1 0 0 1 2 / 8 Datacenter infrastructure 0 0 0 0 0 / 8 NATIONAL ISI 5 2 3 5 15 / 40 The illustrative profile reveals that the hypothetical economy holds substantive sovereignty in the water sector (where transboundary politics has compelled the state to develop autonomous capacity), moderate sovereignty in transportation, and near-zero sovereignty in datacenter infrastructure (a sector whose objects, financing, standards, and transferability are all externally controlled). The aggregate score of 15/40 signals an economy with limited but unevenly distributed infranomic sovereignty — a profile broadly consistent with several mid-sized Eurasian economies, but the assignment to any specific country requires separate empirical verification. The instrument's principal analytical value is not the aggregate number but the matrix of axis scores per sector. A country with ISI total of 15 distributed across the sectors very differently from this example would have a structurally different infranomic situation, despite the identical headline score. The ISI is therefore best deployed as a diagnostic profile rather than as a single rank. 4.3 Limitations and Intended Use The ISI is a coarse instrument by design. It produces an interpretable profile from a small number of axis scores rather than a precise measurement from a large number of indicators. This is a deliberate choice: an instrument intended for use by non-specialists must be coarse enough to be applicable, and the coarseness is offset by the four-axis structure that prevents over-aggregation. Practitioners requiring greater precision should treat the ISI as the entry point to deeper sector- specific analysis. The ISI is not a normative ranking. A higher ISI score is not automatically better than a lower one; the appropriate level of infranomic sovereignty for a given polity is a political question whose answer depends on strategic context, alliance structure, and risk tolerance. The ISI is descriptive # Page 15 of structural position, not prescriptive of policy direction. Its function is to make infranomic position legible, not to assign a normative score. 5. Macro Consequences of Recognizing Infranomics as a Distinct Stratum If Infranomics is correctly identified as a distinct economic stratum with the four features developed above, three classes of consequence follow. 5.1 Sovereignty Redefined as Infranomic Control The first consequence is a structural redefinition of sovereignty. In the classical Westphalian conception, sovereignty consists of legal authority over a defined territory and the population on it. In the infranomic conception, sovereignty additionally requires control over the infranomic objects situated on that territory: the energy networks, transportation systems, water systems, telecommunications, and datacenters through which the population's economic activity is mediated. A state that nominally controls its territory but does not control its infranomic stack is infranomically dependent, and this dependency conditions the substance of its sovereignty regardless of its formal legal status. The ISI introduced in Section 4 operationalizes this redefinition by making the position of any polity legible across the four axes. 5.2 Infrapopulism as the Predictable Political Pathology The second consequence is that infrapopulism, diagnosed in prior work (Rakhimov, 2026d), can now be located precisely within the architecture as the predictable political pathology of infranomic dependency. Where the infranomic stratum is dominated by external actors and the domestic political system has electoral or quasi-electoral mechanisms, the political market will systematically produce candidates and movements that promise to address infranomic dependency rhetorically without the resources to address it materially. The infrapopulist phenomenon is therefore predictable from the infranomic structure of an economy, in the same way that classical populism is predictable from particular configurations of classical-economic distribution. With the ISI, the structural conditions producing infrapopulism become measurable: polities with low ISI scores and contested politics are the predictable sites of infrapopulist mobilization. 5.3 The Hierarchy of Structural Conditioning The third consequence is the recognition of a hierarchy of structural conditioning under which classical economic activity and ultranomic activity both depend on infranomic prerequisites in ways that classical economic theory, treating infrastructure as one sector among others, systematically obscures. Without functioning infranomic foundations, classical economic activity cannot occur at scale: ports without functioning roads cannot move cargo; factories without reliable electricity cannot operate; banks without secure telecommunications cannot clear payments. Without infranomic foundations of sufficient scale and reliability, ultranomic activity cannot occur at all: AI laboratories require gigawatt-scale electricity supply, advanced cooling # Page 16 systems, fibre interconnects to data sources, and physical security at industrial scale. The methodological implication is that economic theory adequate to the contemporary world must include a structural-stratificational dimension. 6. Anticipated Objections In accordance with the Applicata Preprint Workflow standard, the paper anticipates and responds to five classes of objection most likely to be raised by reviewers and discussants. 6.1 Objection: This Is Mere Renaming of Existing Infrastructure Economics The objection runs that Infranomics simply rebrands what infrastructure economics, network economics, and public-goods theory have already studied. The response, developed at length in Section 2.1, is that Infranomics differs in structural object, not in degree. Mainstream infrastructure economics treats infrastructure as a sectoral capital category within the classical economic stratum, asks how much return such capital generates, and operates within the price-and-return framework of classical economic theory. Infranomics treats infranomic objects as a categorically distinct stratum, asks what structural conditions these objects impose, and explicitly identifies dimensions — structural power not reducible to market value, coercion of dependency, sub- economic financing as constitutive — that the classical framework cannot accommodate without abandoning its own assumptions. The two enterprises are not in competition; they operate at different theoretical levels and address different questions. 6.2 Objection: This Conflicts with Gheorghe-Masera Infranomics The objection runs that the term Infranomics is already established in the systems-engineering literature with a different meaning, and the present paper's use of it generates terminological confusion. The response is twofold. First, priority of the term is acknowledged: Gheorghe and Masera introduced the word in 2010 and the present author does not claim originality of the word but of a distinct concept that shares the name. Second, terminological co-existence is possible when context disambiguates: the systems-engineering concept appears in critical-infrastructure and complex-systems journals; the political-economic concept appears in international relations, political economy, and area studies journals. Where ambiguity threatens, the present author uses political-economic Infranomics or stratificational Infranomics to disambiguate. This is the standard solution applied to many academic terms whose meaning varies across disciplines (consider capital, structure, sovereignty themselves) without thereby disqualifying the term. 6.3 Objection: The Concept Cannot Be Operationalized The objection runs that concepts of this generality cannot be applied operationally to specific cases. The response is the Infranomic Sovereignty Index introduced in Section 4. The ISI is a four- axis, five-sector instrument that produces a comparable profile for any polity, applicable by analysts without specialized training. The instrument's coarseness is acknowledged in Section 4.3 and is a deliberate choice for accessibility. Analysts requiring greater precision can use the ISI as # Page 17 an entry point to deeper sector-specific analysis. The objection that the concept is unoperationalizable is, on the present approach, simply false. 6.4 Objection: This Is Just Critical Infrastructure Studies in Disguise The objection runs that authors like Easterling, Larkin, Mitchell, and Khalili have already developed sophisticated analyses of infrastructure as political and structural object, and the present paper offers no genuine theoretical advance over that tradition. The response, developed in Section 2.5, is that critical infrastructure studies and stratificational Infranomics address different problems. Critical infrastructure studies typically operates as critique from positions in cultural theory, anthropology, or political philosophy; its mode is analytical and often genealogical. Stratificational Infranomics is a structural-economic theory that locates infranomic objects within a stratificational architecture relating to classical economic and ultranomic strata. The two traditions are complementary. Critical infrastructure studies provides the historical and political texture; Infranomics provides the structural-theoretical category within which those analyses can be located and from which they can be operationally extended via instruments like the ISI. 6.5 Objection: The Three-Tier Architecture Is Arbitrary The objection runs that any partition of economic activity into discrete strata is theoretically arbitrary, and that the choice of three tiers (rather than two, four, or none) reflects an aesthetic rather than a structural commitment. The response is that the three tiers are not arbitrary partitions of an undifferentiated economic mass but distinct structural levels each defined by its own ontology of objects, agents of action, metrics of value, and logics of reproduction. The infranomic stratum is constituted by the four features developed in Section 3; the ultranomic stratum is constituted by the four features developed in the parallel paper (Rakhimov, 2026e); the classical economic stratum is the well-developed object of mainstream economic theory. Each stratum is distinct from the others by genuine structural features, not by partitional fiat. The three-tier architecture is therefore not arbitrary; it follows from the joint application of the constitutive criteria to contemporary economic reality. 7. Conclusion: Infranomics in the Three-Tier Architecture This paper has provided the canonical definition of Infranomics as the foundational economic stratum of the author's research programme: the economic level at which physical and physical- adjacent infrastructure operates as the material substrate of all subsequent economic activity, and at which objects possess a structural power that the classical economic vocabulary of price, return, and contract does not adequately capture. The stratum is constituted by four features — physical-territorial anchoring, structural power not reducible to market value, coercion of dependency, and sub-economic financing as constitutive. The stratum is operationalized through the Infranomic Sovereignty Index (ISI), a four-axis instrument applicable to any polity. The concept is differentiated from five adjacent traditions and five anticipated objections have been addressed. # Page 18 With this canonical definition in place, the three-tier architecture of the research programme is, for the first time, fully and explicitly defined at all three of its strata. Infranomics (the present paper) names the foundational stratum. The classical economy, a category inherited from the mainstream economic tradition, names the middle stratum. Ultranomics (Rakhimov, 2026e) names the apex stratum. The three strata are vertically related and each operates by its own structural logic. The quantum modulation paper (Rakhimov, 2026g) then examines how the quantum axis (Layer Zero, Rakhimov, 2026f) transforms all three strata while preserving their ontological content. The deeper significance of fixing the definition of Infranomics in canonical form is that it converts an implicit conceptual tool into an explicit theoretical category that other scholars can adopt, critique, and develop. The concept has, until now, been a personal analytical instrument of the present author; with its canonical formulation and operational instrument, it becomes available as a public intellectual contribution to the broader literature on the political economy of the multipolar transition. That conversion — from personal tool to public concept — is the principal purpose of the present working paper. REFERENCES Aschauer, D.A. (1989). Is public expenditure productive? Journal of Monetary Economics, 23(2), 177–200. Blackwill, R.D., & Harris, J.M. (2016). War by Other Means: Geoeconomics and Statecraft. Harvard University Press. Easterling, K. (2014). Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. Verso. Gheorghe, A.V., & Masera, M. (2010). Infranomics. 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Rakhimov Affiliation: Applicata — Centre for Strategic Solutions, Bishkek ORCID: 0000-0003-3756-9375 Paper Number: WP-INF-2026-01 (revised, Workflow-compliant) Language: English (with Russian abstract) JEL Codes: B41; B52; H54; O18; P16; F50 # Page 20 Keywords: infranomics; foundational economic stratum; structural power of infrastructure; physical-territorial anchoring; coercion of dependency; sub-economic financing; Infranomic Sovereignty Index; three-tier stratification; infrastructure political geography; infrapopulism; sovereignty as infranomic control