Green and Blue Economy: Definitions, Challenges and Limits

Background

First of all, a systematic literature review (SLR) was carried out based on the key words of this paper and to do this the approach of Tranfield et al. (2003) was adopted. In this approach a three-step process is proposed: planning, execution, reporting and dissemination.

We start with the planning phase. To achieve our goal, we have entered the selected terms as follows to search for the title, abstract and keywords: “Green Economy” OR “Blue Economy” OR “Sustainability” OR “Greed Economy.”

Moving on to execution the SLR, the initial Scopus search (we choose the Scopus database to ensure the quality of the review¹) based on the selected words appearing in titles, abstracts or key words between 1970 and 2020 identified a total of 192508 publications. We therefore restricted the field to the last 20 years (2000-2020), as our research is based on recent years, obtaining 185833 publications.

By limiting the search to “articles”, “articles in the press”, “reviews”, “books” and “book chapters”, a total of 147076 publications were obtained. Considering only the publications in journals and books, there were 139868 documents. However, to achieve the aims established, only documents included in the fields of economics, econometrics, finance, business, management and accounting were selected, obtaining a total of 30533 publications.

Due to the significant number of articles found and considering that those of greatest interest here would be the ones that incorporated the key words, we used a new filter (the key words “sustainable development”, “environmental sustainability, “green economy” and “fishery management”) obtaining 8211 publications.

After selecting only the open access documents (481 publications) and the language English, the total number of documents obtained was 455. We reported the above SLR process in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

Systematic literature review process. Source: Scopus, own elaborations.

We faced, finally, the last stage of Tranfield approach (reporting and dissemination). A total of 455 publications were obtained from the execution stage of the SLR. The number of publications in 2016 (58), 2017 (66) and 2018 (108) increased, as did future publications for 2019-2020. These topics were published by 126 journals, with 14 of them publishing eight or more articles (262), representing 58% of the total. Analyzing the Scopus impact evaluation of sources with the most publications, 64% are in the first quartile, 21% in the second and 15% in the third, demonstrating the high standard of the publications and the level of interest in the subjects (Table 1).

(Data source: www.scimagojr.com/journalrank.php (own elaborations))