Debt, War, Pandemics and Climate: The New Architecture of Fiscal Risk

Public finance is becoming a frontline arena for risks that once sat outside conventional fiscal policy. Climate adaptation now competes with debt service and development spending, while wars, sanctions, energy insecurity and reconstruction are creating new liabilities that many fiscal frameworks were never designed to absorb.

A new comparative review, "Public Finance Sustainability Under Multiple Crises: A Comparative Bibliometric Analysis Across Economic, Pandemic, Geopolitical, and Environmental Domains," published in the Journal of Risk and Financial Management by Nicoleta Mihaela Doran, Constanta Adriana Gorie and Gabriela Badareu, reveals how unevenly research has responded. Environmental-crisis scholarship is steadily consolidating and carries the highest average citation impact, while geopolitical fiscal research remains small and fragmented: an evidence gap with growing real-world consequences.

Using Web of Science records and the Bibliometrix R package, the authors examine 1,170 publications on economic crises, 285 on pandemic crises, 21 on geopolitical crises and 110 on environmental crises. The result is a map of where public-finance knowledge is mature, where it is rapidly expanding and where governments may be facing major risks with comparatively thin evidence.

Economic Crises Built the Fiscal Playbook, but the Playbook Is Changing

The economic-crisis literature remains the intellectual core of the field. It is the largest of the four research domains, with an annual growth rate of 12.57%, a long publication history stretching back to 1991 and the highest level of internal citation cohesion. Its central themes, public debt, fiscal rules, austerity, growth and countercyclical policy, reflect decades of research shaped by recessions, sovereign-debt episodes and the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis.

Governments already possess a relatively developed body of theory and evidence for managing conventional macroeconomic shocks. Yet the study also finds signs that the field is moving beyond the old debate between stimulus and austerity. Thematic mapping shows greater attention to resilience, governance and the quality of public expenditure, suggesting that fiscal sustainability is increasingly being judged by how well public systems perform under stress, not only by how quickly governments return to numerical targets.

Debt and deficits remain central, but they are becoming part of a larger question: can a state continue financing essential functions when revenues fall, borrowing costs rise and emergency expenditure surges simultaneously? The study's broader interpretation is that fiscal sustainability is gradually being reframed as a dynamic capacity for managing systemic risk rather than a static condition defined by compliance with thresholds.

COVID-19 Globalized Fiscal Research, While Climate Risk Became Structural

Pandemic research developed very differently. The field expanded at an average annual rate of 19.24%, the fastest of the four domains, with publications surging after 2020 as governments confronted unprecedented spending on health systems, income support, business guarantees and emergency administration. The literature also became highly collaborative, recording 28.42% international co-authorship and strong connections between public finance, health policy, public administration and institutional resilience.

Pandemic-related fiscal research drew greater participation from low- and middle-income countries, including Kenya, Ghana, Pakistan and the Philippines. The global nature of COVID-19 appears to have widened knowledge production beyond the traditional concentration of public-finance scholarship in North America and Western Europe, creating a more internationally distributed evidence base on health financing, crisis intervention and fiscal response.

Environmental-crisis research, by contrast, has expanded more gradually, at 6.68% annually, but it records the highest average citation impact at 13.99 citations per document. Its central topics include green bonds, carbon taxation, renewable energy, climate-related fiscal risks, sustainable infrastructure and transition finance, pointing to a field that is becoming increasingly embedded in mainstream fiscal policy rather than remaining a specialist environmental discussion.

The trajectory may prove especially important for developing countries. Climate shocks can simultaneously reduce tax revenues, increase emergency spending and create large adaptation needs, while the green transition itself requires long-term public and private investment. The study's thematic mapping shows that green investment, fiscal sustainability and governance are converging, suggesting that climate policy is becoming a permanent component of public-finance strategy rather than a temporary add-on.

Geopolitical Risk Is Rising Faster Than the Evidence Base

The study identifies only 21 relevant publications between 2009 and 2025, making it far smaller than the economic, pandemic or environmental corpora. Its themes include defense financing, sanctions, energy security, reconstruction and European fiscal governance, but the literature remains fragmented, event-driven and weakly connected internally.

Geopolitical shocks can be fiscally expensive in multiple ways at once. Governments may face higher defense budgets, refugee-related expenditure, energy-price support, reconstruction costs and weaker growth while simultaneously dealing with tighter financial conditions. Yet compared with the mature evidence on recessions and sovereign debt, the fiscal consequences of sanctions, wars and strategic-security commitments remain underdeveloped as a systematic research field.

The study is careful not to overstate conclusions from such a small corpus, and that caution is important. Bibliometric scarcity does not mean governments lack policy experience or that relevant evidence does not exist outside the selected search terms. But the weakness of the formal research base does signal a policy problem: one of the most consequential emerging sources of fiscal pressure is being studied with less consistency, less common methodology and fewer shared analytical frameworks than other crisis categories.

For international financial institutions and development agencies, this creates a strong case for integrating geopolitical exposure into debt-sustainability and fiscal-risk analysis. Energy dependence, defense obligations, sanctions exposure and reconstruction liabilities increasingly interact with traditional macroeconomic variables, particularly in vulnerable economies with limited fiscal space.

The Next Fiscal Framework Must Be Designed for Overlapping Shocks

Each crisis generates different fiscal pressures, but together they reveal a common direction: governments increasingly need frameworks that can manage economic stabilization, public-health preparedness, strategic security and climate transition as interconnected risks rather than separate policy silos. The authors explicitly argue that fiscal resilience requires crisis-specific instruments alongside more integrated approaches to systemic risk assessment.

For developing economies, the stakes are particularly high. Countries with narrower tax bases, higher borrowing costs and limited access to domestic-currency finance may have less room to absorb simultaneous shocks. A climate disaster can arrive during a debt squeeze; an energy shock can worsen inflation while increasing subsidy demands; a health emergency can hit when budgets are already constrained by debt service. Fiscal resilience therefore depends partly on whether policy systems are designed for compounding risks rather than single-crisis scenarios.

The research also carries implications for public investment. Spending on climate adaptation, resilient infrastructure and health preparedness may appear costly in conventional annual budgets, but such investments can reduce the severity of future shocks. The bibliometric study does not estimate these fiscal returns directly, so that conclusion remains an analytical inference rather than an empirical result of the paper, but it follows closely from the broader resilience logic identified across the literature.

There are important limitations. The study relies solely on Web of Science and uses deliberately narrow, symmetrical search strings based on the phrase "public finances," meaning relevant work using terms such as fiscal policy, sovereign debt, taxation, war, sanctions or climate change may be missed. Citation metrics also favor older literature, and the small geopolitical sample makes strong cross-domain comparisons premature.

The authors thus call for multi-database validation, broader keyword sensitivity tests and improved citation normalization, alongside deeper research on fiscal-rule flexibility, long-term health-emergency costs, conflict financing, sanctions, strategic public goods and the distributive effects of green fiscal instruments.