We address the question how sensitive international knowledge flows respond to geo-political conflicts taking the politico-economic tensions between EU-Russia since the Ukraine crisis 2014 as case study. We base our econometric analysis on comprehensive data covering more than 500 million scientific publications and 8 million international co-publications between 1995 and 2018. Our findings indicate that the imposition of EU sanctions and Russian counter-sanctions from 2014 onwards has significant negative effects on bilateral international scientific co-publication rates between EU countries and Russia. Depending on the chosen control group and sectors considered, effect size ranges from 15% to 70%. Effects are also observed to grow over time.
@article{arxiv.2112.00564,
title = {Geo-political conflicts, economic sanctions and international knowledge flows},
author = {Teemu Makkonen and Timo Mitze},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2112.00564},
year = {2021}
}