Public financial governance and the entrepreneurial capabilities of local governments: a bibliometric mapping of the field and a research agenda

Abstract

The repositioning of territorial collectivities as actors in economic development raises, at the crossroads of three bodies of literature, public finance, organizational resilience and entrepreneurship, a research question whose articulation remains to be established. A prior conceptual study posited a causal link connecting these domains, from a critical-realist epistemological positioning and drawing on institutional theory and the dynamic capabilities approach. The present article builds its empirical counterpart by testing the reality of the claimed deficit through an objective mapping of global scientific output.

The approach falls within science mapping and follows a PRISMA-inspired protocol. Five queries, crossing the central constructs in pairs, were run simultaneously in Scopus and Web of Science. The final corpus brings together 4,477 records distributed across five corpora analysed separately and processed with the bibliometrix package in R. The analysis combines performance indicators, co-occurrence networks and strategic thematic mapping.

The results reveal a threefold blind spot. The public finance dimension remains almost absent from the dense field linking resilience and entrepreneurship (952 documents), as well as from the field associating entrepreneurship and territorial collectivities (2,616 documents), where fewer than 4% of titles contain a financial term. Research on Morocco (459 documents) never links local finances and entrepreneurial dynamics. The explicit intersection of the three fields forms the smallest sub-corpus, 62 documents, and the most recent. The contribution is twofold, methodological through the use of co-occurrence as proof of an absence, and cognitive through the objectification of an agenda around the chain of financial governance, organizational resilience and entrepreneurial capacities.

JEL Classification : H70; L26; R58; O18

Paper type : Empirical research (bibliometric analysis)