Digital Marketing and Sustainable Economic Development Trends in Developed and Underdeveloped Countries: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Abstract. The level of socioeconomic development depends on the mode of production, and the world economies have undergone revolutions from agricultural, industrial, and then digital, giving rise to developed, developing and underdeveloped economies. The purpose of this research is to use bibliometric analysis to study the trends of digital marketing and sustainable development in developed and underdeveloped countries. The authors resorted to the Scopus database to extract 119,981 documents for developed economies and filtered them to 29,071 for Scopus analysis. Then, 9854 documents were also extracted for underdeveloped economies and refined to 2850 to perform comparative analysis. The filtered documents were exported to VOSviewer for visualization mapping, including coauthorship and co-occurrence analysis using English. The results revealed that the total number of documents produced in developed economies from 1950 to 2023 was 29065, compared to 2816 produced in underdeveloped economies, representing just 8.9% of the total world output. The study revealed a general upward growth trend in both developed and underdeveloped economies. The results further revealed that developed economies strengthened their research collaborations, the United States was the most influential for developed economies, and China was the most influential in research done in developing economies. The research findings indicate that digital marketing has been the most influential among the cowords and the main driver of the global economy between developed and underdeveloped.