The economic impact of climate change: a bibliometric analysis of research hotspots and trends

Climate change has been a widely concerned issue for decades. As the key policy target, the economic impact caused by climate change has received general attention from scholars and governments around the world. For the number of literatures is huge and the relationships among the literatures are not clear, we aim to clarify the research hotpots and the research trends of current literatures and provide inspiration for the development directions of future research in this paper. Using the bibliometric method, this paper characterizes the literatures on the economic impact of climate change based on the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection. The results reveal that the USA occupies the leading position of the studies, which publishes most documents, and contains the most productive institutes and well-known scholars. From 2009, the number of documents published by a Chinese scholar started to increase rapidly, which makes China the second most productive country in recent years. The journals both belong to the WoS Categories of economics and environmental sciences and tend to publish more literatures than others. Adaptation, vulnerability, uncertainty, economic growth, climate policy, ecosystem service, energy consumption, renewable energy, food security, and land use are the representative keywords that have both high frequency and high centrality. Potential benefits, fat-tailed risk, social cost, international migration, and sustainable intensification are the top five main research hotspots. Based on the citation network of the top 50 documents with the highest local citation score, four research trends are sorted out: (i) the methodological innovation to monetized estimate the economic impact of climate change, (ii) the effect of current and future adaptive measures on agriculture, (iii) the interactional relationship between induced technological change and carbon tax, and (iv) the effect on labor market caused by climate change.