Navigating the landscape of economic policy research in India : A computational analysis
*Manendra Kumar SinghCorresponding authormanebhu007@gmail.comDepartment of Library and Information ScienceMizoram UniversityAizawl, Mizoram, 796004, India0000-0001-9495-8962View full profile →
* Corresponding author · click or hover a name for details
- Published Online:
- 30 Jun 2026
- Article type:
- Research Article
- Language:
- EN
- Article no.:
- CJSIM-2025-12001
- Pages:
- 249–274
Abstract
The present study examines the emerging landscape of Economic Policy Research (EPR) in India using a comprehensive bibliometric and textmining framework applied to 2,911 journal articles published between 2010 and 2024. It integrates Biblioshiny, VOSviewer, LDAShiny, and BERTopic to map publication trends, collaboration networks, and thematic evolution. The findings highlight a steady annual growth rate of 14.26%, alongside a thematic shift from traditional concerns, such as poverty and macroeconomic stabilization, toward sustainability, renewable energy, financial inclusion, and international trade. Topic modeling identifies dominant clusters around monetary policy, environmental sustainability, and economic growth, while emerging research themes are climate adaptation and digital finance. The study contributes methodologically by combining probabilistic and transformer-based topic modeling approaches, offering a nuanced understanding of research dynamics. These insights provide valuable implications for policymakers, researchers, and institutions in aligning future economic strategies with evolving global and national priorities.
Keywords
References
[1] K. Basu, India’s Emerging Economy: Performance and Prospects in the 1990s and Beyond. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2004.
[2] M. S. Ahluwalia, “Economic reforms in India since 1991: Has gradualism worked?” J. Econ. Perspect., vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 67–88, 2002.
[3] V. Joshi and I. M. D. Little, India’s Economic Reforms 1991–2001. Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996.
[4] H. R. Varian, “Big data: New tricks for econometrics,” J. Econ. Perspect., vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 3–28, 2014.
[5] T. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA, USA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2014.
[6] G. Gopinath, “The great lockdown: Dissecting the economic effects,” IMF Econ. Rev., vol. 69, no. 1, pp. 1–20, 2021.
[7] A. Subramanian, Of Counsel: The Challenges of the Modi Economy. New Delhi, India: Penguin Random House India, 2019.
[8] N. Donthu, S. Kumar, D. Mukherjee, N. Pandey, and W. M. Lim, “How to conduct a bibliometric analysis: An overview and guidelines,” J. Bus. Res., vol. 133, pp. 285–296, 2021.
[9] N. J. van Eck and L. Waltman, “Visualizing bibliometric networks,” in Springer Handbook of Science and Technology Indicators, W. Glänzel, H. F. Moed, U. Schmoch, and M. Thelwall, Eds. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2014, pp. 285–320.
[10] M. Aria and C. Cuccurullo, “Bibliometrix: An R-tool for comprehensive science mapping analysis,” J. Informetr., vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 959–975, 2017.
[11] D. M. Blei, A. Y. Ng, and M. I. Jordan, “Latent Dirichlet allocation,” J. Mach. Learn. Res., vol. 3, pp. 993–1022, 2003.
[12] A. Mishra, “Temporal analysis of computational economics using LDA, LSA, and BERTopic: A bibliometric and topic modeling approach,” Computational Economics, 2025, doi: 10.1007/s41060-024-00596-9.
[13] H. Jung and J. Lee, “A bibliometric and BERTopic-based analysis of Bitcoin research in business and economics,” FinTech, vol. 4, no. 4, Art. no. 68, 2025, doi: 10.3390/fintech4040068.
[14] T. T. Nguyen, Q. T. Pham, and L. H. Tran, “Evaluating topic modeling techniques for bibliometric analysis: A comparative study of LDA and BERTopic,” HighTech and Innovation Journal, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 85–98, 2024.
[15] C. Rangarajan, “The Indian economy: Current problems and future prospects,” Econ. Polit. Wkly., vol. 53, no. 1, pp. 45–52, 2018.
[16] A. Bhattacharya and U. R. Patel, “Climate policy and finance in India: Preparing for a green transition,” Econ. Polit. Wkly., vol. 55, no. 12, pp. 43–51, 2020.
[17] P. Sharma and R. Gupta, “Bibliometric laws and their applications in research evaluation,” Library Trends, vol. 64, no. 3, pp. 321–337, 2015.
[18] J. Gorraiz and C. Schloegl, “A bibliometric analysis of pharmacology and pharmacy journals: Scopus versus Web of Science,” J. Inf. Sci., vol. 34, pp. 715–725, 2008.
[19] A.-R. Ramos-Rodríguez and J. Ruíz-Navarro, “Changes in the intellectual structure of strategic management research: A bibliometric study of the Strategic Management Journal, 1980–2000,” Strategic Manage. J., vol. 25, pp. 981–1004, 2004.
[20] D. J. S. Price, Little Science, Big Science and Beyond. New York, NY, USA: Columbia Univ. Press, 1963.
[21] I. Ajiferuke, Q. Burrell, and J. Tague, “Collaborative coefficient: A single measure of the degree of collaboration in research,” Scientometrics, vol. 14, pp. 421–433, 2005.
[22] J. S. Katz and B. R. Martin, “What is research collaboration?” Res. Policy, vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 1–18, 1997.
[23] S. Wuchty, B. F. Jones, and B. Uzzi, “The increasing dominance of teams in the production of knowledge,” Science, vol. 316, pp. 1036–1039, 2007.
[24] C. Chen, F. Ibekwe-SanJuan, and J. Hou, “The structure and dynamics of co-citation clusters: A multiple-perspective analysis,” J. Amer. Soc. Inf. Sci. Technol., vol. 61, no. 7, pp. 1386– 1409, 2010.
[25] M. E. J. Newman, “Networks in applied sciences,” Nat. Phys., vol. 14, no. 6, pp. 542–550, 2018.
[26] A. Abbasi, J. Altmann, and L. Hossain, “Identifying the effects of co-authorship networks on research impact,” J. Amer. Soc. Inf. Sci. Technol., vol. 63, no. 2, pp. 240–255, 2012.
[27] M. Röder, A. Both, and A. Hinneburg, “Exploring the space of topic coherence measures,” in Proc. 8th ACM Int. Conf. Web Search Data Mining, 2015, pp. 399–408.
[28] M. Grootendorst, “BERTopic: Neural topic modeling with a class-based TF-IDF procedure,” J. Open Source Softw., vol. 7, no. 72, p. 3868, 2022.
[29] D. Williams and L. Chen, “Growth vs. impact: The evolving landscape of academic citations,” Scientometric Stud., vol. 47, no. 2, pp. 98–114, 2021.
[30] S. C. Bradford, “Sources of information on specific subjects,” Engineering, vol. 137, pp. 85–86, 1934.
[31] A. J. Lotka, “The frequency distribution of scientific productivity,” J. Washington Acad. Sci., vol. 16, no. 12, pp. 317–324, 1926.
[32] S. K. Patra and S. Mishra, “Bibliometric study of bioinformatics literature,” Scientometrics, vol. 67, pp. 477–489, 2006.
[33] R. Gupta and H. Kaur, “Authorship patterns and research productivity in economic studies,” J. Informetr., vol. 12, no. 4, pp. 1012–1025, 2018.
[34] H. Zhao and M. Li, “Bibliographic coupling in academic research networks,” J. Informetrics, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 201–219, 2020.
[35] A. Das and S. Roy, “Institutional networks and research performance: Evidence from Indian academia,” Scientometrics, vol. 124, no. 1, pp. 153–174, 2020.
[36] A. Mitra and Y. Chen, “Global research collaboration in economic policy: A network analysis,” J. Econ. Stud., vol. 49, no. 3, pp. 487–504, 2022.
[37] N. Sharma and R. Yadav, “Journal coupling and research convergence in economic studies: A bibliometric perspective,” J. Informetrics, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 202–214, 2021.
[38] I. Zupic and T. Čater, “Bibliometric methods in management and organization,” Organ. Res. Methods, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 429–472, 2015.
[39] B. P. Singh and S. Kumar, “Public debt and economic growth in India: The new evidence,” Millennial Asia, vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 429–446, 2024, doi: 10.1177/09763996221136908.
[40] D. Mehta and M. Mallikarjun, “Impact of fiscal deficit and trade openness on current account deficit in India: New evidence on twin deficits hypothesis,” EconomiA, vol. 24, no. 2, pp. 172–188, 2023, doi: 10.1108/ECON-07-2022-0091.
[41] S. Sikhwal and S. Sen, “Comparative analysis of machine learning models for money demand forecasting in the Indian economy,” HSE Econ. J., vol. 28, no. 1, pp. 133–158, 2024, doi: 10.17323/1813-8691-2024-2-1-133-158.
[42] R. Ghosh, B. Bagchi, and S. Chatterjee, “The effect of economic policy uncertainty index on the Indian economy in the wake of COVID-19 pandemic,” J. Econ. Admin. Sci., vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 591–604, 2024, doi: 10.1108/JEAS-08-2021-0172.
[43] G. K. Roy and A. Dubey, “Does higher labour market flexibility discourage R&D? Firmlevel evidence from India’s organised manufacturing,” Indian J. Labour Econ., vol. 66, no. 4, pp. 1119–1130, 2023, doi: 10.1007/s41027-024-00472-x.
[44] S. Krithi, “State, labour and emerging natural resource regimes: A case study of forestbased livelihoods in Chamba Himachal Pradesh,” J. South Asian Dev., vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 433–454, 2023, doi: 10.1177/09731741211070043.
[45] S. Tripathi and K. Yenneti, “Does inequality in urban population distribution lead to income inequality? Evidence from India,” Asia-Pac. J. Reg. Sci., vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 787–818, 2024, doi: 10.1007/s41685-024-0034-7.
[46] J. Singh and M. Singh, “Alleviating urban poverty in India: The role of capabilities and entrepreneurship development,” Int. J. Soc. Econ., vol. 51, no. 10, pp. 1314–1335, 2024, doi: 10.1108/IJSE-07-2023-0514.
[47] K. Mehra and S. M. Dogga, “Human capital and innovation nexus in India: Evidence from simultaneous equation modelling,” Econ. Affairs, vol. 68, no. 3, pp. 1423–1432, 2023, doi: 10.46852/0424-2513.3.2023.10.
[48] S. Mehrotra and T. Giri, “Enterprise informality in India: The blind spots in public policy,” Indian J. Labour Econ., vol. 66, no. 3, pp. 687–710, 2023, doi: 10.1007/s41027-023-00450-9.
[49] V. Kumar and P. Dua, “What explains foreign portfolio investment inflows to BRICS countries?” Econ. Anal. Policy, vol. 82, pp. 32–46, 2024, doi: 10.1016/j.eap.2024.02.033.
[50] A. Yadav and M. K. Mahalik, “Does renewable energy development reduce energy import dependency in emerging economies? Evidence from CS-ARDL and panel causality approach,” Energy Econ., vol. 131, Art. no. 107356, 2024, doi: 10.1016/j.eneco.2024.107356.
[51] K. H. Shareef and S. Shijin, “The term structure of interest rates and macroeconomic factors: Evidence from Indian financial market,” Borsa Istanbul Rev., vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 249–256, 2017, doi: 10.1016/j.bir.2017.06.001.
[52] P. Tripathy, P. Behera, and B. R. Mishra, “Why do specific regions attract more FDI inflows in India? Role of region-specificities and insights from dynamic panel econometrics,” Int. J. Econ. Bus. Res., vol. 23, no. 4, pp. 411–434, 2022, doi: 10.1504/IJEBR.2022.123171.
[53] U. A. Peer, R. Katoch, and A. Sidhu, “Volatility spillover effects and risk assessment of Indian green stocks: A DCC-GARCH analysis,” J. Energy Markets, vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 49–71, 2023, doi: 10.21314/JEM.2024.001.
[54] T. Ghosh and S. S. Ramanayake, “The macroeconomics of gender equality,” Int. J. Finance Econ., vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 1955–1977, 2021, doi: 10.1002/ijfe.1888.
[55] N. Kumari and N. C. Sahu, “Socio-economic determinants of subjective wellbeing of Indians in the post-liberalization era: Evidence from the world value survey,” Asia-Pac. J. Reg. Sci., vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 1091–1121, 2023, doi: 10.1007/s41685-023-00314-6.
[56] D. Nayyar and G. Nayyar, “Made in India: Industrial policy in a changing world,” J. Ind. Compet. Trade, vol. 24, pp. 1–13, 2024, doi: 10.1007/s10842-024-00417-6.
[57] S. K. Devalkar and S. Seshadri, “Managing flexibility in supply chains: Mathematical analysis of dual sourcing systems,” IMA J. Manag. Math., vol. 35, no. 4, pp. 557–571, 2024, doi: 10.1093/imaman/dpae019.
[58] R. Kumari and S. K. Singh, “Impact of ICT infrastructure, financial development, and trade openness on economic growth: New evidence from low- and high-income countries,” J. Knowl. Econ., vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 7069–7098, 2024, doi: 10.1007/s13132-023-01332-7.
[56] R. Sinha Ray, “Can environmental SDGs moderate trade and environment nexus? A South Asian context based on panel ARDL approach,” Appl. Econ., vol. 56, no. 30, pp. 3600–3620, 2024, doi: 10.1080/00036846.2023.2206636.
[60] N. Sreenu, “Exploring unbalanced impacts of exchange rate volatility on the shadow economy: New evidence from BRICS nations,” Econ. Change Restruct., vol. 57, no. 4, 2024, doi: 10.1007/s10644-024-09727-5.
[61] C. Sievert and K. Shirley, “LDAvis: A method for visualizing and interpreting topics,” in Proc. Workshop Interact. Lang. Learn., Vis., Interfaces, pp. 63–70, 2014.
[62] M. Sahoo and N. Sethi, “Does remittance inflow stimulate electricity consumption in India? An empirical insight,” South Asian J. Bus. Stud., vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 45–66, 2022, doi: 10.1108/SAJBS-05-2020-0158.
[63] P. Verma, P. Soni, and K. Malhotra, “A cross-country empirical investigation of association between financial inclusion and economic growth,” Int. J. Bus. Emerg. Markets, vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 563–587, 2024, doi: 10.1504/IJBEM.2024.141737.
[64] B. Pal, A. Mandal, and S. S. Sana, “A closed-loop green supply chain with retailers’ competition and product recycling in the green environment under the cap-and-trade policy,” Green Finance, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 117–161, 2024, doi: 10.3934/GF.2024006.
[65] Z. S. Ahluwalia and R. Kaur, “Effectiveness of foreign aid to India in post-liberalization era: The self-reliant India expedition,” Indian J. Econ. Dev., vol. 17, no. 1, 2021, doi: 10.35716/IJED/20190.
[66] R. Singh, C. P. Gupta, and P. Chaudhary, “Dividend policy and corporate life cycle: A study of Indian companies,” Manag. Finance, vol. 49, no. 11, pp. 1722–1749, 2023, doi: 10.1108/MF-01-2023-0053.
[67] D. Mishra, G. Mangla, and N. Maheshwari, “Gendered pathways to entrepreneurial success: A study on women’s career choices in India,” Int. J. Sociol. Soc. Policy, vol. 44, pp. 1000–1023, 2024, doi: 10.1108/IJSSP-04-2024-0161.
[68] P. Mishra and P. Montiel, How Effective Is Monetary Transmission in Low-Income Countries? IMF Working Paper WP/12/143, 2012, doi: 10.5089/9781475503627.001.
[69] D. Mohanty, Monetary Policy Framework in India, RBI Working Paper Series 06/2013, Dept. Econ. Policy Res., Reserve Bank of India, 2013.
[70] S. Mehrotra, Informality and Employment Trends in India: Definitional, Statistical and Policy Implications, ILO Working Paper No. 36, 2021.
[71] P. Dasgupta, The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review. London, UK: HM Treasury, 2021.
[72] International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook 2022. IEA, 2022.
[73] R. Baldwin and S. J. Evenett, COVID-19 and Trade Policy: Why Turning Inward Won’t Work. CEPR Press, 2020.
[74] A. Demirgüç-Kunt, L. Klapper, D. Singer, and S. Ansar, The Global Findex Database 2021. World Bank, 2022.
[75] M. Geissdoerfer, P. Savaget, N. M. P. Bocken, and E. J. Hultink, “The circular economy—A new sustainability paradigm?” J. Cleaner Prod., vol. 143, pp. 757–768, 2017.
