Deteriorating geopolitical relationships associated with declines in cross-border research, study finds
A new paper in the journal Research Policy has found that increases in “geopolitical distance” between countries are associated with reduced research collaboration.
And there are indications that collaborative relationships are “easier to break than to build” – worsening geopolitical relations were associated with reductions in collaboration that were around three times greater than equivalent improvements from closer relationships between countries.
The paper – Burning bridges or bridging divides: geopolitics and collaboration in research and innovation – is authored by a team from Harvard Kennedy School’s Growth Lab. It seeks to explore how the shifting landscape of globalisation – characterised by rising protectionism and geopolitical tensions – might be expected to affect the international collaboration landscape.
The authors draw on United Nations voting patterns data as a proxy for geopolitical distance between countries, while noting that more nuanced measures might be employed in future studies. To measure scientific and technological collaboration between countries, patent data from Patstat Global and the OpenAlex research database were employed.
The study also observes that the negative association between geopolitical distance and collaboration is “particularly pronounced in critical technologies – especially in collaborations involving the United States and China.” Critical technologies are defined as those with “strategic geopolitical importance”, based on 25 areas identified by the European Commission.
In passing, the authors note that globalisation of research and innovation activities has “proceeded unevenly across different domains of knowledge production.” Based on their choices of data source, we see continuing growth between 2000 and 2020 in scientific papers with cross-border authorship, while for international patent collaborations there has been an “inverted-U pattern,” with growth in the first decade of the century followed by a decline thereafter.