Unveiling Trade Dynamics of India's Economic Engagement with BIMSTEC : A Bibliometric Review

Abstract

Over the last 20 years, the Indian involvement in the “Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation” (BIMSTEC) has started to receive more and more academic and strategic interest. This paper is a bibliometric analysis of the economic relation of India with BIMSTEC member countries between the year 2001 and 2024 using 59 journal articles indexed by Scopus. With the help of tools such as VoS Viewer and Biblioshiny in R-Studio, the study examines the intellectual structure and development of scholarly activities in this domain in terms of publication trends, prominent authors, collaboration networks, key word co-occurrence, and bibliographic coupling. The result shows that the most prolific contributing nations are India and Bangladesh, and Bangladesh has the highest number of total link strength (TLS) and total citation (TC). Qamruzzaman M., and Pesaran M.H. are the most  prominent authors, while the journals such as “Journal of Environmental Management and Sustainability (Switzerland)” are especially prominent due to their significant scholarly contribution. The 5 key source clusters and 4 country clusters are identified in the analysis that reveals regional and cross-regional academic collaboration. According to the keywords co-occurrence analysis, there is an increased concern on renewable energy, and sustainable development. This paper forms a baseline review of the scholarly contributions to the research on India-BIMSTEC trade, offering valuable insights for policymakers, stakeholders, and scholars. It highlights the importance of having a deeper empirical study and more interdisciplinary engagements to improve the regional economic cooperation and achieve the full potential of BIMSTEC.