Public Finance Sustainability Under Multiple Crises: A Comparative Bibliometric Analysis Across Economic, Pandemic, Geopolitical, and Environmental Domains

Public finance sustainability has become increasingly shaped by recurrent systemic shocks, yet the structure and evolution of research at the intersection of public finances and different types of crises remain insufficiently synthesized. This study provides a comparative bibliometric assessment of four crisis domains—economic, pandemic, geopolitical, and environmental—to identify their developmental trajectories, intellectual cores, and collaboration patterns. Using records extracted exclusively from the Web of Science and processed through the Bibliometrix R package (R version 4.2.2), the analysis covers 1170 publications for economic crises (1991–2025), 285 for pandemic crises (2010–2025), 21 for geopolitical crises (2009–2025), and 110 for environmental crises (1991–2025). The results show that the economic crisis literature represents the most mature and cohesive field, characterized by a sustained annual growth rate of 12.57% and strong internal citation density. The pandemic corpus expanded rapidly during 2020–2022, with the highest growth rate (19.24%) and elevated levels of international co-authorship. The geopolitical segment remains comparatively small and fragmented, while the environmental domain demonstrates steady growth (6.68%) and the highest average citation impact (13.99 citations per document). Overall, the findings indicate differentiated stages of institutionalization across the four domains and suggest a gradual shift toward conceptualizing fiscal sustainability as a dynamic capacity to manage systemic and multidimensional risks.