Implications of Educational Poverty in a Post-Globalization World

In a post-globalization world where technological development and automation are becoming more prevalent in the labor market, acquiring and developing skills have become more crucial. While the expansion of education is becoming a global process increasing the general level of educational attainment, scholars are also interested in those remaining behind. This paper aims to comprehensively analyze the major topics in the literature regarding educational poverty and other concepts related to low educational attainment. First, we conducted a bibliometric analysis using the R package bibliometrics and the Biblioshiny app on all the articles on this topic indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus databases. Through the bibliometric analysis, we have highlighted the main areas and themes of interest in the scientific research on educational poverty and potential future research directions through a science mapping that enables investigating scientific knowledge. To explore the development of the research field in terms of publications, author impact, countries, citation patterns, trend topics, the relationship between keywords-authors-journals, abstracts’ analysis, multiple correspondence analysis of major research themes, and keyword analysis have been applied. We used descriptive analysis and data reduction methods on the articles’ metadata to show the main concepts in the field and their grouping dynamics. The bibliometric analysis is further complemented by a text analysis on a sample of articles most representative of the field. The current analysis contributes to a better understanding of current research interests regarding educational poverty, highlighting its main determinants and implications for societies and economies. We use our findings for the formulation of some policy implications to address the identified issues.