The Development of Global Public Goods Research: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Global public goods (GPGs) have been moving to the focus of discussion in international organisations due to globalisation, deepening economic integration, and technological advancements. We provide an overview of the research field of GPGs by conducting a bibliometric analysis for the period from 1993 to 2021. The increasing number of publications and citations of articles dealing with GPGs in the Web of Science is particularly noteworthy in the last decade. Publications on GPGs related to climate change experienced the largest relative growth. Analysis of the co-occurrence networks on authors’ keywords revealed that the focus of GPG research shifted between the 1993–2008 and 2009–2021 subperiods. In the latter period, our results show that sustainable development and the use of GPGs are interconnected and that the need for global governance related to GPGs is increasingly recognised in the literature. Several interrelated challenges of today’s world, related to environmental, technological, health, (cyber)security, economic, and geopolitical transformations have created the need for a new approach to GPGs.