Do economists think about climate change and inequality? Semantic analysis and topic modeling of top five economics journals

IF 6.6 2区经济学 Q1 ECOLOGY

Ecological Economics Pub Date : 2025-03-01 DOI:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2025.108548

Hassan El Tinay, Juliet B. Schor

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

While there has been a call for economics to engage with the challenges of climate change, many have voiced concerns that the discipline has failed to seriously deal with the relationship between climate change and inequality. In this paper, we use computational methods – including bibliometric analysis, semantic analysis, and topic modeling – to identify a) the extent to which the core of the discipline of economics has dealt with the question of climate change and b) how engagement with climate change has been framed, especially with respect to varying forms of inequality – intergenerational, domestic, and global. As a proxy for the core of mainstream economic thought, we work with publications from the top five economic journals – American Economic Review (AER), Econometrica (ECMA), The Journal of Political Economy (JPE), The Quarterly Journal of Economics (QJE), and The Review of Economic Studies (ReStud) – from 1975 to 2023. We find that over this period, these journals have cumulatively only published 25 unique research articles on the topic of climate change, and we also find that those publications reflected a lack of engagement with the role and consequences of domestic and global inequality in dynamics of climate change.

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在呼吁经济学参与应对气候变化挑战的同时，许多人也对该学科未能认真处理气候变化与不平等之间的关系表示担忧。在本文中，我们使用计算方法--包括文献计量分析、语义分析和主题建模--来确定：a）经济学学科的核心在多大程度上处理了气候变化问题；b）参与气候变化问题的框架是如何确定的，尤其是在不同形式的不平等--代际不平等、国内不平等和全球不平等--方面。作为主流经济学思想核心的代表，我们研究了《美国经济评论》（AER）、《计量经济学》（ECMA）、《政治经济学杂志》（JPE）、《经济学季刊》（QJE）和《经济研究评论》（ReStud）这五大经济学期刊从 1975 年到 2023 年的出版物。我们发现，在此期间，这些期刊累计只发表了 25 篇有关气候变化主题的独特研究文章，而且我们还发现，这些文章反映出这些期刊缺乏对国内和全球不平等在气候变化动态中的作用和后果的研究。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Ecological Economics 环境科学-环境科学

CiteScore

12.00

自引率

5.70%

发文量

313

审稿时长

6 months

期刊介绍： Ecological Economics is concerned with extending and integrating the understanding of the interfaces and interplay between "nature''s household" (ecosystems) and "humanity''s household" (the economy). Ecological economics is an interdisciplinary field defined by a set of concrete problems or challenges related to governing economic activity in a way that promotes human well-being, sustainability, and justice. The journal thus emphasizes critical work that draws on and integrates elements of ecological science, economics, and the analysis of values, behaviors, cultural practices, institutional structures, and societal dynamics. The journal is transdisciplinary in spirit and methodologically open, drawing on the insights offered by a variety of intellectual traditions, and appealing to a diverse readership. Specific research areas covered include: valuation of natural resources, sustainable agriculture and development, ecologically integrated technology, integrated ecologic-economic modelling at scales from local to regional to global, implications of thermodynamics for economics and ecology, renewable resource management and conservation, critical assessments of the basic assumptions underlying current economic and ecological paradigms and the implications of alternative assumptions, economic and ecological consequences of genetically engineered organisms, and gene pool inventory and management, alternative principles for valuing natural wealth, integrating natural resources and environmental services into national income and wealth accounts, methods of implementing efficient environmental policies, case studies of economic-ecologic conflict or harmony, etc. New issues in this area are rapidly emerging and will find a ready forum in Ecological Economics.