New insight into the Bibliometric Analysis on the Topic of Environmental Kuznets Curve

Abstract

The topic of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) was searched on Web of Science and 2, 747 documents were obtained from 2010 to 2020. Among them, 2616 documents were selected and analysed using the bibliometrix package in the R language. Results showed that Environmental Science and Pollution Research were the most literature sources, and the country with the most researches was China. Keywords analysis revealed that most researches were focused on the EKC, economic development, and carbon dioxide (CO2) emission, and the last item was the main environmental pollution problem. Most researches were focused on income distribution, benefits, ecological footprint, globalization, and degradation evidence. Dividing these documents into three stages with 2014 and 2018 as the nodes, economic growth was focused from 2010 to 2014, following was focused on emissions and then the international tourism from 2019 to 2020. EKC was easily visualized among the co-citation network of authors, the co-occurrence network of keywords and the cooperation network of countries. EKC historical graph showed that the global environment should be considered as a whole to research environmental pollution and economic development, and more research should be focused on the EKC related to clean energy and sustainable development. Therefore, by analysing a large number of documents and using scientific measurement methods, it is convenient for future research on the EKC hypothesis.