Book translations as information flows: How detrimental was
Communism to the flow of ideas?*
[Preliminary and incomplete]
December 2009
Ran Abramitzky
Isabelle Sin
Stanford University
Stanford University
Abstract
We use a difference-in-differences strategy that compares Communist with Western European
countries to test the effect of the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe on the flow of book
translations between countries. We find that translations of Western European titles into former
non-Soviet Communist countries increased by a factor of eight with the fall of Communism and
reached Western levels, while translations between non-Soviet Communist countries decreased
by a factor of four. In contrast, Western translations into former Soviet countries experienced a
substantially smaller increase. The collapse of Communism mainly encouraged the translation of
titles in fields such as religion, philosophy, and economics, but had little effect on the translation
of scientific titles such as mathematics, medicine and physics. Furthermore, translations of titles
whose authors voiced anti-Communist opinions, titles published in the Communist era, academic
titles, and those written by Nobel laureates experienced a large increase in Communist countries
post collapse. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that Communism discouraged the
international flow of information and ideas, especially those that were perceived to be more
threatening or less useful for the regime. The patterns we find are also consistent with cultural
convergence of non-Soviet Eastern and Western Europe, and with little convergence of Soviet
and Western countries.
JEL Classification: F14, F15, N70, P21, P33, P51, P52
Keywords: transition economies, Communism, trade, ideas
* Email: [email protected] and [email protected]. We are grateful to Manuel Amador, Kamran Bilir,
Nick Bloom, Aaron Bodoh-Creed, Albie Bollard, Tim Bresnahan, Elan Dagenais, Doireann Fitzgerald,
Avner Greif, Caroline Hoxby, Nir Jaimovich, Seema Jayachandran, Pete Klenow, Naomi Lamoreaux, Ed
Leamer, Aprajit Mahajan, Neale Mahoney, Kalina Manova, Nathan Nunn, John Pencavel, Luigi
Pistaferri, Gary Richardson, Robert Staiger, Alessandra Voena, Romain Wacziarg, Gui Woolston, Gavin
Wright, and participants of the applied micro working group, the labor/development reading group, the
social science history workshop, and the macro bag lunch at Stanford, and the All-UC Group Graduate
Student Workshop in Economic History for most useful suggestions. We owe special thanks to the Index
Translationum team, especially Alain Brion, Mauro Rosi, and Marius Tukaj for providing us with the
translation data.
1. Introduction
By common wisdom, Communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe controlled the
inflow of information and ideas from the West and their circulation within the Communist
countries (e.g. Harrison 2005). However, it is challenging to empirically asses the nature and
extent of this phenomenon, both because it is hard to know how information would have flowed
to these countries in the absence of the Communist regimes, and because information flows are
by nature difficult to measure. More generally, while the economics literature has recognized the
importance of information and ideas for growth and development (e.g. Romer 1990, 1993,
Mokyr 2003), their transmission is challenging to measure.
We address this challenge in two ways. First, we suggest a new quantitative measure of
the flow of ideas across countries, namely translations of books (see also Sin, 2008). The written
word is an important means for storing and transmitting ideas between individuals, and in the
absence of translation, many of these ideas would not leave the language, culture, or society in
which they were conceived. We thus view book translations as a measure of the flow of ideas
between societies, and, while translations are only one way societies gain new ideas, they are an
important and easily quantifiable measure of the flow of knowledge, ideas and culture between
linguistically distinct groups. An attractive feature of translations as a measure of ideas is that
they capture both “technical” ideas (such as titles in exact and applied sciences), and ideas that
are more “social” and “cultural” (such as titles in religion, philosophy, literature and the social
sciences).
Second, we suggest an empirical strategy to measure how Communism restricted
information and idea flows. A wave of revolutions in 1989 and the disintegration of the Soviet
Union in 1991 ended Communism in Central and Eastern Europe, bringing to a close the Cold
War that had divided Europe into East and West. We use this main historical event and a
comparison with Western Europe to investigate how the collapse of Communism affected the
flow of ideas between capitalist and Communist countries and among Communist countries, and
the types of ideas that were affected the most. By addressing these questions, this paper sheds
light on the consequences of the transition away from Communism in Eastern Europe.1
1
Specifically, there is a literature that documents and explains the transition of Eastern European countries from
Communism into market economies (e.g. Blanchard 1994, 1996, 1998, Aghion and Blanchard 1994, Frye 2003).
There is also a literature exploring the “natural experiment” created by the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe
and elsewhere to learn about individuals’ preferences and behavior (e.g. Munich et al 2002, Alesina and Fuchs-
2
To test the effect of the collapse of Communism on the flow of ideas, we use data on 800
thousand book translations for the period 1980 to 2000 extracted from Unesco's Index
Translationum (IT), an international bibliography of the translations published annually in a wide
range of countries. We compare Communist countries with Western European countries, as well
as exploit the variation between the degrees of transition away from Communism.
First, we use graphs and difference-in-differences regression analysis to show that when
Communism collapsed the overall flow of translations from Western Europe into the former nonSoviet Communist countries increased by a factor of eight. At the same time, translations
between Communist countries decreased by a factor of four. In contrast, Western translations
into the former Soviet countries experienced a substantially smaller increase. Among Communist
countries, those that experienced greater levels of transition showed larger changes in their
translation flows. These patterns suggest that translations from the West into the Eastern Bloc
were substantially suppressed under Communism, and translations between Communist
countries were, on average, inflated. Furthermore, since the collapse of Communism, the Soviet
satellites have caught up with Western Europe in their translations of Western European titles,
given their levels of GDP and population, suggesting a cultural convergence of the Soviet
satellites to Western Europe.
Second, we show that the effects of Communism’s collapse differed significantly by
field. For instance, translations in the field of religion, which was considered an enemy of the
Communist regime and was firmly suppressed under it, rebounded the most when Communism
fell. Translations of natural science, the study of which was strongly supported by Communist
governments, and which was important for the USSR’s standing on the world stage, increased
relatively little from the West, and decreased the most of any field between Communist
countries.
Third, we focus on a sample of titles that were considered highly influential in the West,
and augment our translation data on these titles with more detailed information on the book
content and its author.
We find that Communist translation of influential Western titles
increased sharply post collapse. The effect of the collapse on the translation of influential titles
was large in the fields of economics, history, sociology, political science, literature, philosophy
Schuendeln 2007, Fuchs-Schuendeln 2008, Abramitzky 2008, Abramitzky and Lavy 2008). However, this paper is
the first to test the effect of the fall of Communism on the flow of information and ideas.
3
and psychology, but minimal for medicine, physics and biology titles. Furthermore, translations
of titles whose authors voiced anti-Communist opinions, titles published in the Communist era,
academic titles, and those written by Nobel laureates experienced a large increase in Communist
countries post collapse. For example, one of our influential titles is Isaiah Berlin’s 1969 book,
“Four Essays on Liberty”. Berlin was a philosopher and historian of ideas, was one of the leading
liberal thinkers of the 20th century, and featured prominently in the intellectual and ideological
battle against Communism during the Cold War. His book was translated before 1989 by
Western European countries, but was only translated after the collapse of Communism in former
Eastern Bloc countries. Similarly, F.A. von Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom”, an influential
exposition of classical liberalism and libertarianism, was translated widely in Western Europe in
the early 1980s, but not in Communist Europe until 1989. In contrast, Karl Marx’s “Das
Kapital” was translated prior to the collapse in both Communist and Western countries. The
translation dates in Western and Communist Europe of these three titles are illustrated in Figure
1.
Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that Communism discouraged the
international flow of information and ideas, especially those that were perceived to be more
threatening or less useful for the regime. The patterns we find are also consistent with cultural
convergence of non-Soviet Eastern and Western Europe, and with little convergence of Soviet
countries to Western countries. Naturally, there are other potential ways to measure the flow of
ideas between countries. For instance, ideas embedded in people are transmitted by tourism and
migration, ideas embedded in firms are transmitted via foreign direct investment, and ideas
embedded in goods are transmitted by international trade. In Section 4.3, we show that the fall
of Communism also increased the flow of ideas as measured by these alternative measures.
However, for each of these activities, the transmission of ideas is a byproduct rather than the
driving force. In the case of book translations, on the other hand, the flow occurs expressly for
the purpose of transmitting the ideas between linguistically distinct societies. In Section 5, we
discuss the advantages and limitations of using book translations as a measure of the flow of
ideas.
This paper proceeds as follows. In Section 2 we present the data on book translations and
explain the construction of our measure of idea flows. Section 3 outlines our empirical strategy
in historical context. It begins by describing our “treatment” (former Communist) and “control”
4
(Western European) countries in the context of the collapse of Communism in Europe. It then
describes the institutional background of publishing in Communist Europe, illustrating how
Communist governments centrally planned the book publishing industry and restricted the
publication and translation of books through censorship. The section concludes with a
description of our empirical strategies. The first is a difference-in-differences empirical strategy
for examining how the fall of Communism affected the flow of ideas from capitalist countries
into Communist countries, and between Communist countries. The second is a simple OLS
regression strategy that examines the relationship between the degree of transition of Communist
countries and the change in their translations. Section 4 presents the results. It shows the effect
of the collapse of Communism on total translations from Communist and Western languages,
translations by field, the translation of influential titles by characteristics of the authors, and on
several other measures of idea flow. Section 5 discusses some advantages and limitations of
books translations as a measure of the flow of ideas between societies.
Section 6 draws
conclusions and proposes some mechanisms through which the effect of Communism on
translations might operate.
2. Data
2.1. The flow of book translations across countries
The translations data are extracted from Unesco's Index Translationum (IT), an
international bibliography of the translations published in a wide range of countries over the
periods 1932 to 1940 and 1948 to the present. These data originate at the national level through
the law of legal deposit, which specifies that every book published that is intended for circulation
must be submitted to the national depository. The national depository then compiles a list of the
publications that are translations, and submits this list to Unesco, which standardizes the entries
across countries to form the IT.
Titles in the IT are categorized according to the nine main categories of the Universal
Decimal Classification (UDC) system: General; Philosophy (including Psychology); Religion
and Theology; Law, Social Sciences, Education; Natural and Exact Sciences; Applied Sciences;
Arts, Games, Sports; Literature (including books for children)2; History, Geography, Biography
(including memoirs and autobiographies).
2
Literature also includes the very small category Philology and Linguistics.
5
The bibliographic entry for each translation includes information on the country, city, and
year in the which the translation was published, the language of the original title and the target
language into which it was translated, the field (UDC class) of the title, the number of pages or
volumes of the title, the author, and the title of the translation. It may include additional
information such as the publisher of the translation, the price of the translation, information on
any intermediate language through which the title was translated, and further details on the
original title.3
We use data on the translations in Communist countries (our treatment group) and
Western European countries (our control group) over the period 1980 to 2000, which comprise
approximately 800 thousand translations in all. The Communist countries we include are: seven
former Soviet countries (Russia, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, the Ukraine),
Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. The other European
countries are: Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, Denmark, Spain, Finland, France, Iceland, Italy,
the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and Sweden.4 Not all of these countries reported their
translations to Unesco every year, so we include each country only in the years it reported a notinsignificant number of translations.5 We note that Germany is excluded from the analysis
because our data do not allow us to know whether a translation after unification was in East or
West Germany. The UK is also excluded because it stopped reporting its translations to Unesco
in 1990.
Creation of translation series over time for some of these countries is complicated by the
fact they only became separate countries upon the upheaval of interest in the middle of our
period of study. Prior to 1992, the USSR as a whole reported its translations; prior to 1993,
Czechoslovakia as a whole reported its translations. We allocate the translations reported by the
USSR and Czechoslovakia to one of their constituent countries based on the city in which each
translation was published.
3
Unfortunately, the country in which the original title was published and its date of first publication are not among
the included information.
4
Results are largely unchanged if we include the USA to the group of Western countries.
5
Translations for a country in the years it did not report tend to be very few as opposed to zero because not all
translations are reported the year they were published, thus a country’s report to Unesco for, say, 1989, is likely to
include a few translations published in 1988 or even earlier.
6
From the individual records of translations, we construct our main variable of interest,
inward translations of a country.6 The construction of this variable is complicated by the lack of
a one-to-one mapping between countries and languages. We deal with this by choosing a “main”
language for each country, defined as the most widely spoken language in the country.7 In our
main specification, we count as inward translations only those translations reported by a country
for which the target language is the country’s main language. One potential bias of our analysis
could be if many translations into Communist languages are actually published in Russia rather
than in the home country, in which case we would under-report the ideas flowing into the other
Communist countries. To account for this possibility, we ran specifications including Russia’s
translations into other Communist languages as translations in the appropriate Communist
countries. In fact, the number of such translations was very low and the results (available from
the authors) are effectively unchanged. Another possibility is that Communist countries, whose
people could often read Russian, got their ideas in Russian rather than in their own language. To
account for this possibility, we look at translations into Russian in the Communist countries in
addition to translations into the main languages of the countries. The results, shown in Appendix
Table C are qualitatively the same; the increase in Western translations in the Soviet nations post
collapse is greater than in our central specification, but these countries still lag behind the
Satellite countries. We further consider two subsets of inward translations, namely those that
originate in a Communist language, and those that originate in a Western European language.8
Another variable of potential interest is outward translations from a country, though
constructing this variable presents several additional challenges.9 Similarly to inward
6
Our preferred dependent variable is the total number of titles translated, but we also experimented with limiting
translations to titles 49 pages or longer (the minimum length for a “book” as defined by Unesco), and with an
alternative dependent variable: the number of pages translated. The results (presented in Appendix Tables A and B)
are similar.
7
“Most widely spoken” is defined in terms of native speakers where these data are available, otherwise in terms of
the language spoken at home or spoken on a day-to-day basis.
8
Similarly to Germany, the German language is neither classified as an Eastern Bloc language nor a Western
European language. The Eastern Bloc languages are: Armenian, Azerbaijani, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Czech,
Estonian, Georgian, Hungarian, Kazakh, Kirghiz, Latvian, Lithuanian, Moldovan, Polish, Romanian, Russian,
Slovakian, Tajik, Turkmen, Ukrainian, and Uzbek. The Western European languages are: Danish, Dutch, English,
Finnish, French, Modern Greek, Icelandic, Irish, Italian, Maltese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish.
9
First, because the IT does not contain translations published in every country in the world, we are unable to
construct a comprehensive measure of translations out of each language. We instead make the more modest attempt
to measure outward translations that are published in the other countries included in our sample. Second, because
we lack information on the country in which each original title was published, we cannot allocate outward
translations to countries in the ideal way in cases where more than one country publishes books in the same
language. Instead, we allocate a proportion of the annual translations out of a language to each country where that
7
translations, we also consider outward translations that are published in Communist countries,
and those that are published in Western European countries separately.10
Although Index Translationum data are the most comprehensive available on translations
in multiple countries, they do suffer from several imperfections. Like most data gathered from
multiple countries, consistency of definitions across countries is problematic. This manifests
itself in the definition of a “book” that therefore warrants inclusion, and in the categorization of
titles by field. In addition, the only translations reported are those that were submitted to the
central depository of the country.
In particular, this excludes samizdat, the illegal books
published under the Communist regime. The exclusion of these titles is unfortunate. However,
the large personal risk involved in owning such books suggests their circulation was limited, and
the ideas contained therein were not available to the general populace.
We also extract from the Index Translationum data the translation patterns of a sample of
titles considered important and influential in the West. The titles selected are those given on any
one of three lists. The first is the Central and East European Publishing Project’s (CEEPP) list of
the 100 books that have been most influential in the West since 1945. This list was assembled in
1994, and appeared in Garton Ash (1995). The second is the Modern Library’s list of the 100
best non-fiction books of the 20th century published in English.11 The third is National Review’s
best 100 non-fiction books of the 20th century.12 A considerable number of titles appear in more
than one of these lists. We omit all titles that were not translated in any of our sample countries
in the period 1980-2000, and any titles that were first published later than 1985. This leaves us
with a total of 161 titles. When we analyze these titles by field, we supplement with 24
additional influential titles noted as influential in their fields.13 For each of these titles, we used
language is the most widely spoken. The proportion used for each country is that country’s share of the world
production of titles in the given language in 1979 (Sin 2008). Third, for outward translation data to be comparable
across the years, the set of translating countries over which translations from the language are summed must be the
same each year, yet even our included countries lack data for some years in the sample. Thus, for the purposes of
creating measures of outward translation only, we impute translations published in each of our countries in years for
which these data are missing by using the number of translations published the previous year where available, and
otherwise the following year. We count as outward translations only those translations published in our sample
countries that are translated into the main language of the country publishing them.
10
Note Germany is again excluded.
11
The “Board’s List”, available at www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100bestnonfiction.html.
12
http://www.nationalreview.com/100best/100_books.html
13
These additional titles include titles from the 25 greatest science books listed in DISCOVER magazine
http://discovermagazine.com/2006/dec/25-greatest-science-books/article_view, economics titles from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_important_publications_in_economics, general physics books from
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Administrivia/booklist.html and political books from
8
various online sources to establish the publication date of the original book, classify both the
author and the book by subfield (e.g. economics, physics, biology, medicine, political science),
determine whether the author expressed explicitly anti-communist views, and whether he or she
was a Nobel laureate or a university professor.
To test the effect of the collapse of Communism on whether and how widely a title was
translated, we generate two alternative dependent variables. Each dependent variable is defined
over the two periods pre (1980-1988) and post (1989-2000) and the two regions Western Europe
and Communist Europe.14 The first dependent variable is the number of countries in which the
title was translated in the region and period. The second is a dummy that takes the value 1 if the
title was translated in the region and period, and 0 otherwise15
We use three alternative sub-samples for which we have consistent data. Our preferred
sample consists of translations in the Communist countries Bulgaria, the Czech Republic,
Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Estonia, and Belarus, and the Western European countries Spain,
France, Denmark, Norway, Austria, and Belgium for the years 1980-2000. The first alternative
sample also includes Russia, but only uses the period 1980-1996. The second alternative sample
differs from the preferred sample in that it also includes Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, Iceland, and
Moldova, but only uses the periods 1980-89 and 1995-2000.
2.2 The degree of transition away from Communism
We use four variables to measure the degree to which the Communist countries
transitioned from communist, centrally-planned economies to democratic market economies,
namely institutionalized democracy, political competition, price liberalization, and trade and
foreign exchange system reform.
The variables institutionalized democracy and political competition are from the Polity
IV data set, described at and available from www.systemicpeace.org/polity/polity4.htm.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/jul/12/politicalbooks.economy. Again we restrict to titles published in
1985 or earlier, and those translated at least once in our sample.
14
Note this cutoff date of 1989 for “post” differs to the 1991 used in the analysis of the total number of translations.
The reason we prefer this earlier date for the analysis of individual titles is that by 1989 Gorbachev’s reforms had
greatly reduced the Communist regime’s restrictions on information flows, so we don’t want to attribute a
translation published in 1989 to the pre-collapse period. Note also that the results from the analysis of the total
number of translations are qualitatively robust to defining post as 1989 onwards.
15
We count Russian as an additional main language for the Soviet countries, and only include translations into the
main languages of the countries.
9
Institutionalized democracy is measured on a scale of 0 to 10, with greater values indicating
more democratic political systems. Political competition captures the degree of regulation of
participation and the competitiveness of participation in the political arena. It is measured on a
scale of 1 to 10, where larger values denote more regulation and more competitiveness. These
variables are available for all the Communist countries in our sample for each year 1980 to 2000.
The variables price liberalization and trade and foreign exchange system reform were
developed by The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and are available at
www.ebrd.com/country/sector/econo/stats/index.htm. Each is measured on a scale from 1 to
4.33, where 1 indicates “most prices formally controlled by the government” and “widespread
import and/or export controls or very limited legitimate access to foreign exchange” for the two
variables respectively, and 4.33 indicates “standards and performance typical of advanced
industrial economies: complete price liberalization with no price control outside housing,
transport and natural monopolies” and “standards and performance norms of advanced industrial
economies: removal of most tariff barriers; membership in WTO”.16 These two variables are
available for all the Communist countries in our sample for each year 1989 to 2000.
3. Historical context and empirical strategy
3.1. “Treatment” and “control” groups: A brief timeline of the fall of Communism in the
Eastern Bloc
Coming into the 1980s, the Soviet Union and its satellites were all Communist countries
with centrally planned economies, in which the ruling (and only) party, the Communist Party
under some name or other, interfered in virtually all aspects of its citizens’ lives. The Eastern
Bloc was isolated from Western Europe by the Iron Curtain, which hindered the movement of
both people and information.
The changes that would result in the fall of the Eastern Bloc began in the late 1980s when
Gorbachev came to power in the USSR. Among the reforms he instituted, perhaps the most
important two were perestroika, restructuring of the economy and political system, and glasnost,
openness in the media and culture. Through these sets of gradual reforms, the Soviet Union
began to move in the direction of a market economy, with a decrease in centralization and the
16
These descriptions of the values are from www.ebrd.com/country/sector/econo/stats/timeth.htm.
10
emergence of private firms, and the increase in the freedom of people to express their views on a
range of topics without fear of retribution.
An important consequence of glasnost was that people could now openly air their
dissatisfaction with the Communist regime. This freedom spread to the Soviet satellites, and was
likely a contributing factor in revolutions that heralded the fall of the Berlin Wall and the
collapse of the Communist regimes in the satellite countries in the last few months of 1989.
The Communist USSR held together for nearly a further two years, though the power of
the Soviet Communists was waning and nationalism in the Soviet republics was on the rise. Late
in 1991, a conservative coup in Russia aimed at preventing the disintegration of the Soviet Union
was staged. Its unintended effect was just the opposite; the USSR was officially dissolved.
The Communist countries had many commonalities, but there was also heterogeneity
within this group in the degree to which Communism fell. We address this in two ways. First,
we additionally consider the effect of the fall of Communism on two subsets of Eastern Bloc
countries, essentially Soviet and non-Soviet countries. Second, we run alternative regressions
that compare Communist countries that transitioned away from Communism to different degrees,
and investigate the effects of transition on translation flows.
A natural way to divide Communist countries is into Soviet and Soviet satellite countries,
with the former developing a more Russian orientation and the latter a more Western orientation.
Such Russian orientation might reveal itself through greater remaining governmental controls on
translations post collapse, consumer preferences that favor Western ideas less, and a lower effort
or desire to integrate with Western Europe.
A closer look at the USSR, however, reveals that the three Baltic states of the Soviet
Union, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, are more similar to the Soviet satellites than they are to
Soviet nations. They were more recent additions to the USSR (annexed in 1940), and always
maintained their more Western feeling. The Baltic states’ independent streak was highlighted
when, upon the collapse of the Soviet Union, they were the only three Soviet states not to join
the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the loose alliance of independent countries that
succeeded the USSR. Since the disintegration of the USSR, the former Communist countries
have coalesced into two trading blocs: the Russia-focused CIS countries in one, and the Westerncentered non-CIS countries, including the Baltic states, in the other.
Because of these
differences between the Baltic states and other Soviet states, we assign the three Baltic states to
11
the Soviet satellites. We note that results are similar when excluding the Baltic states from the
analysis or when assigning them to a separate group.17
In summary, we use two sets of treatment groups in our empirical analysis. The first is a
single treatment group, namely Communist countries that belonged to the Eastern Bloc and were
Warsaw Pact members in the 1980s;18 the second consists of two treatment groups, namely the
Russia-focused Soviet countries, and the Western-centered Soviet satellites. Our control group
in both cases is Western European countries that were not Communist during this period. Figure
2 is a map of our treatment and control groups.
3.2. Blocking information flows: publishing and censorship under Communism
Prior to Gorbachev’s reforms, book publishing in the Soviet Union was a state-run
industry that produced vast numbers of books with little regard for consumer demand.19 All
publishers were owned and operated by the government, and each had its own subject area or
field in which it enjoyed a complete monopoly. Book prices, like other prices and wages in the
publishing industry, were strictly controlled; each subject had a designated price range, chosen to
ensure the subjects the government intended to be widely read were available at low cost.
Selection of the titles published was centrally coordinated and crafted according to the
government’s grand plan.20 Central to the organization of the Soviet publishing system was the
conception of publishing as an ideological activity. Reading was viewed as a way in which the
social consciousness of individuals was shaped, thus full state control over the material published
and its availability to citizens was vital. Profits and publishing in order to meet demand were
considered less important, through periodically concern surfaced in Soviet publishing circles
17
Alternatively, we divide the Communist countries by whether they are Slavic or non-Slavic, and by whether they
are primarily Catholic or Orthodox. Translations in the Slavic countries show similar patterns to those in the Soviet
nations, and translations in the non-Slavic countries are similar to in the Soviet satellites. However, the Slavic/nonSlavic difference is less pronounced than the Soviet/satellite difference. Similarly, the Orthodox countries behave
more like the Soviet nations and the Catholic countries more like the satellites, though the distinction here is smaller
again. The Slavic countries are Russia, the Ukraine, Belarus, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, and Bulgaria.
The Catholic countries are Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary.
18
We omit Albania and Yugoslavia although their data are available because they withdrew from the Warsaw pact
in 1968 and 1948 respectively, thus in our period of interest they were no longer politically aligned with the Soviet
Union.
19
Skelly and Stabnikov (1993).
20
Walker (1978).
12
about the shortages of books in specific fields. Furthermore, in the mid to late 1970s, increasing
attention started being paid to studying and forecasting reader demand.21
The process determining the exact titles printed in any year was complex and centrally
planned to a high degree. USSR-level and republic-level authorities decided on the proportion of
total books published in the coming year that would be in each subject area, and assigned
printing capacity, paper, and binding materials to individual publishers. Working within these
bounds and other specifications given to them, publishers compiled their own lists of planned
printings, each item on which then received an approval, rejection, or other recommendation
from a “coordinating” central authority. Considerations for the coordinating authority were
maintaining the subject monopolies of the printing houses, avoiding duplication of subject
matter, and economy in the use of paper, which was often in short supply. Additional centralized
planning occurred that was related to the publication of translations.22
Foreign titles were selected for translation by utilizing experts employed for the purpose
at home, representatives located in numerous countries abroad, and foreign visiting experts such
as scientists. The representatives located abroad reviewed tens of thousands of new books
annually. They then bought copies of the most important titles from local bookshops, and mailed
them back to their publishers in the USSR.23
Censorship of books intended for sale in the USSR was the domain of Glavlit
(occasionally referred to by its full name, the “Chief Administration for the Protection of State
Secrets in the Press attached to the Council of Ministers of the USSR”). Editors of publishing
houses were expected to use their good sense in selecting titles for publication, but the corrected
galley-proofs (granki) then had to be perused by Glavlit “…both for the mention of prohibited
topics and for the observance of political lines and nuances…” (Walker, 1978, page 66) before
publication could occur.24
Censorship of translations followed a somewhat different, but undoubtedly no less
rigorous, process, explained by Walker (1978):
21
Walker (1978).
Walker (1978).
23
Bernstein et al. (1971).
24
Walker (1978).
22
13
The importance of careful and vigilant selection by Soviet publishers in choosing works for
translation from foreign languages has been frequently stressed by Party and government, and is
visible in a number of special regulations applying to the publication of translations.
A
publishing-house considering translation of a foreign work must, unless there is a special need for
speedy publication, obtain at least two recommendations for the translation from scholarly
institutions or specialists, and secure the agreement of the appropriate chief editorial office in the
State Committee for Publishing before submitting details of the work for ‘coordination’ to the
State Committee or (in the case of scientific and technical works) to the State Scientific and
Technical Library.”25
Between 1986 and 1991, control over the publishing industry moved out of state hands.
State-owned publishing houses were joined by a multitude of other ownership structures,
competition entered the industry, and the focus shifted away from producer-led publishing to
consumer-led publishing. The monopoly system of publishers was scrapped; price controls and
many state subsidies were terminated. Through the reforms, firms, organizations, and institutions
gained the right to publish, and Russian authors and publishers gained the right to freely buy or
sell rights, including in transactions with international parties.26
3.3. How did the fall of Communism affect the flow of ideas between capitalist and
Communist countries? How did it affect the flow of ideas among Communist countries?
3.3.1. Comparing Communist countries with Western European countries
Our main empirical strategy is a simple difference-in-differences specification that uses
the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe as the source of variation. Here we illustrate in
detail this diff-in-diff strategy when predicting the number of translations in a country, but we
use a similar strategy when we analyze keywords and highly influential titles. Our treatment
group is former Communist countries; our control group is Western European countries that
were not communist during this period. We include all countries for which we have sufficient
data both before and after the collapse of Communism. We are missing the smaller former
Soviet countries further east, namely Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,
Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.
25
26
Page 119.
Skelly and Stabnikov (1993).
14
Specifically, we test whether, upon the collapse of Communism, book translations in
former Communist countries (treatment group) increased relative to translations in nonCommunist Western European countries (control group). Our empirical strategy also allows us
to examine the extent to which translations in Communist countries converged to the level of
translations in Western European countries after the fall of Communism. Specifically, we run
various versions of the following OLS regression:
Yit = " 0 + "1Communist i # Post t + " 2Communist i + " 3 Post t + $it
!
(1)
where Y is the (log) number of inward book translations in country i in year t. Post t is a dummy
variable for the years 1991 and onwards,27 Communist i is a dummy variable for whether the
country was a former Communist country, and Communist i " Post t is the interaction between
!
these two variables. The coefficient on the latter variable measures the effect of the fall of
!
Communism on translations into Communist countries.
!
However, we expect translations from Western languages to be differently affected by the
fall of Communism to translations from Communist languages. Specifically, if Communism
indeed suppressed information flows from the West, we expect translations from Western
languages to increase after the fall of Communism.
Moreover, to the extent Communist
countries artificially translated more from each other during Communism, we expect translations
from Communist languages to decrease with the fall of Communism.
For this reason, we allow the effect of the fall of Communism to differ between
translations from Western languages and those from Communist languages. Specifically, we
include a dummy variable for whether the translation is from a Western European language
( WesternLang j ), and its converse, a dummy for the translation being from a Communist
language ( CommunistLang j ).28 We interact these dummies with the main effects and interaction
!
of interest to give
!
27
We experiment with alternative Post variables, namely post-1989, post-1990, and post-1992 and the results (not
presented) are essentially the same. We choose post-1991 because it is midway between the end of Communism in
the Soviet satellites (late in 1989) and the collapse of the Soviet Union (late in 1991). We also plan to allow the date
of post to differ for the Soviet Union and its satellites.
28
Note CommunistLang + WesternLang = 1, so our specification is fully interacted with respect to the language of
the translation.
15
%Yijt = "1a Communist i # Post t # WesternLang j + "1b Communist i # Post t # CommunistLang j )
'
'
+ " 2a Post t # WesternLang j + " 2b Post t # CommunistLang j
'
'
* (2)
&
+ " 3a Communist i # WesternLang j + " 3b Communist i # CommunistLang j
'
'
'
'
+ " 4 aWesternLang j + " 4 b CommunistLang j + " 5 X it + $ijt
+
(
where Yijt is the (log) number of book translations from either a Communist language or a
!
Western European language, and j denotes Communist or Western language. The variables of
!
interest in these specifications are the interactions Communist i " Post t " WesternLang j and
Communist i " Post t " CommunistLang j , whose coefficients measure the effect of the fall of
!
Communism on translations from Western or!Communist languages into Communist countries
(relative to Western European countries). Our control variables X it include population, and
GDP per capita; we also include specifications that interact the dummy for whether a language is
Communist (as opposed to Western European), CommunistLang j , with country fixed effects and
!
with country-specific linear time trends. Under our hypothesis that Communism suppressed
information flows from the West into the Eastern Bloc, we expect "1a to be positive. The
!
expected sign of "1b is less clear, but is expected to be negative if Communist countries
substituted Communist translations for Western ones.
!
We next present results with two treatment groups, namely the former Soviet countries,
!
which have a Russian orientation, and the Soviet satellites, which have a more Western European
focus. To allow for a different effect in the Soviet satellites, we partially interact a dummy
variable for Soviet satellites (Satellite), with a dummy for Communist countries (Communist) to
yield regressions of the form:
%Yijt
'
'
''
&
'
'
'
'(
)
'
+ "1b1Communist i # Post t # CommunistLang j + "1b 2Communist i # Satellitei # Post t # CommunistLang j '
''
+ " 2a Post t # WesternLang j + " 2b Post t # CommunistLang j
* (3)
+ " 3a1Communist i # WesternLang j + " 3a 2Communist i # Satellitei # WesternLang j
'
'
+ " 3b1Communist i # CommunistLang j + " 3b 2Communist i # Satellitei # CommunistLang j
'
'+
+ " 4 aWesternLang j + " 4 b CommunistLang j + " 5 X it + $ijt
= "1a1Communist i # Post t # WesternLang j + "1a 2Communist i # Satellitei # Post t # WesternLang j
!
16
The main coefficients of interest are "1a 2 and "1b 2 , which capture whether inward translations
from Western European and Communist languages respectively increased more in the Soviet
satellites than in Soviet countries when Communism fell.
!
!
While our main regressions include titles originally published in any year, it is interesting
to ask whether the effect of the collapse of Communism operates mainly through a jump in
translations of new titles (flows), or whether it is driven by Communist countries catching up by
translating older titles they’d missed out on during the previous 70 years of Communist rule
(stocks). Our data set does not lend itself easily to infer the years in which the original titles were
published. However, for the years 1985, 1993 and 1996, we sampled a total of over 1,400
translations from Western languages, identified their original dates of publication from online
sources, and used these to estimate the age distribution of translations of Western titles.29 We
define flows as titles translated within 15 years of their publication. These titles make up the
overwhelming majority of translations in most fields, suggesting our main analysis primarily
looks at flows.30 Appendix Tables D1 and D2 present difference-in-differences results run
separately for flows and stocks using the three sampled years. They show the collapse of
Communism affected the translation of both flows and stocks of Western titles.
In addition to our analysis of inward translations, we run similar specifications with Yijt
as outward translations.
In these specifications, the dummy variables WesternLang and
CommunistLang are replaced by dummy variables for the target language being a Communist
!
language or a Western European language. In Section 4.2, we run the inward translation
regressions separately for books in each field to examine whether Communism affected certain
types of translations more than others.
3.3.2. Comparing Communist countries that transitioned to different degrees
The difference-in-differences regressions described in the previous section primarily
make use of the difference between Western European countries, which were never Communist,
and the Communist countries of Eastern Europe.
An alternative comparison group to
Communist countries that transitioned into market economies is Communist countries that did
29
Specifically, we identified the original publication date of a random sample of 30 translations in each group of
translations defined by field, year, and region (Communist or Western Europe), and applied the age distribution of
each such sample to the total titles in the group.
30
Literature is the exception, where flows account for roughly half the titles translated.
17
not transition. Specifically, the collapse of the Communist regime was not uniform across the
entire Eastern Bloc, and we expect the countries that transitioned more into democratic market
economies to have experienced greater increases in their translations from the West, and greater
declines in translations from the East.31 To test these predictions, we run regressions that predict
translations from Western European or Communist languages using a “degree of transition”
variable fully interacted with Western European original language, plus controls. We include
only the former Communist countries in these regressions, and run them for the years 1980-2000
or 1989-2000, depending on the availability of the “degree of transition” variable. The variables
we use that capture the degree to which the country had transitioned are institutionalized
democracy, political competition, price liberalization, and trade and foreign exchange system
reform. They were described in more detail in Section 2.2. In each case, a higher value indicates
a greater degree of transition.
We control for price liberalization and trade and foreign
exchange system reform in a single regression, which allows us to investigate which type of
transition was more important for which type of translation.
4. Results
4.1. How did the collapse of Communism affect translation flows from Western European
countries into Communist countries, and flows between Communist countries?
4.1.1. Comparing Communist countries with Western European countries
This section begins with a graphical analysis of the effect of the fall of Communism on
inward translations, after which we subject the patterns to regression analysis. Figure 3 shows
average inward translations normalized by population in the Soviet satellites, the Soviet
countries, and the Western European countries. For each set of countries, translations are split
by whether they are translated from a Communist language or a Western European language.
Translations from languages that fall into neither of these categories are excluded.
This figure shows that before the fall of Communism, Western European countries had
much higher translation rates into their main language than Communist countries, and these
translations were almost entirely from Western European languages.
The Soviet satellites
translated more than the Soviet countries, and both sets translated primarily from Communist
31
A drawback of this approach relative to our difference-in-differences analysis is that these reforms were less
exogenous than the single event of Communism collapsing.
18
languages. However, in the few years around 1990, the patterns of translation for Communist
countries changed drastically. The Soviet satellites’ translations of Western European titles
rocketed up to approach the level of translations of Western European countries, and their
translations of Communist titles fell away. By the year 2000, the Soviet satellites had translation
patterns remarkably similar to those of Western European countries, though still with a slight
bias towards translations from other former Communist countries. The Soviet countries also
experienced a fall in translations from Communist languages, but their increase in translations
from Western European languages was short-lived. These translation patterns stand in contrast
to inward translations of Western European countries, which show no distinct change over this
period.32
We next subject these patterns to regression analysis, while controlling for other factors
that might affect translations. For instance, income differences might explain why the Soviet
countries enjoyed a much smaller inflow of ideas from Western Europe upon the collapse of
Communism than did the Soviet satellites; the Soviet countries have had more difficulty
overcoming their post-collapse recessions than the Soviet satellite countries. The regressions
show, however, that differences in GDP cannot fully explain the difference between the Soviet
and Soviet satellite countries.
Table 1 presents our main difference-in-differences regression results. The dependent
variable in each column is the log of inward translations from either a Communist language or a
Western European language. The first column is a basic difference-in-differences specification
with no additional controls. We see that, as suggested by the graphs, Communist translations
from Western European languages rose when Communism collapsed, whereas translations
between Communist countries fell. The magnitudes of these effects are large.
The second column shows that these effects are robust to controlling for log population
and log GDP per capita.33
The third column adds country fixed effects interacted with
Communist original language; the main results hold and remain significant. The fourth column
is the most demanding specification. It allows translations from Communist languages and from
Western European languages to be on different linear time trends in each country, and identifies
32
Translations from English show very similar changes over time to translations from all Western European
languages.
33
We currently do not have comparable population or GDP data for Iceland, thus this country is excluded in the
specifications where these controls are included.
19
the effect of the fall of Communism off changes in translations over and above these time trends.
The main results hold up, though the decrease in translations from Communist languages
decreases in significance. Note, however, that this specification may in fact underestimate the
effect of the fall of Communism on translations because the changes that constituted the fall of
Communism were many and occurred over several years around the date we attribute to the fall,
so some of these changes are likely falsely attributed to the time trends in this specification. 34
Columns 5 to 8 use the same controls as columns 1 to 4, but allow the treatment effect to
differ for Soviet satellites relative to Soviet countries. We see the increase in translations from
Western European languages was larger for the Soviet satellites, and the decrease in translations
from Communist languages was larger for Soviet countries in most specifications (though the
latter difference is not statistically significant). A comparison of column 5 with column 6 reveals
that differences in income can account for some but not all of the difference between the postCommunism translation experiences of the Soviet countries and those of the Soviet satellites.
Columns 2-4 and 6-8 include controls for log population and log GDP per capita. In
columns 2 and 6, where country fixed effects are not included, the coefficients on these variables
are identified primarily off cross-country differences. Both have the expected positive sign and
are significant, indicating richer and more populous countries translate more. However, when
country fixed effects are included, the coefficient on population becomes large and negative. In
these specifications the coefficients on population and GDP per capita are identified off the
differences in growth rates between countries. Thus the negative coefficient on population
indicates countries with faster growing populations, which tend to be the poorer countries, have
translation rates that grow more slowly.
One way to put the magnitude of the effect of Communism’s fall on translations into
perspective is to ask what change in GDP per capita would be required to cause the same change
in translations. Using the third specification in our main regression table, we see a 789%
increase in GDP per capita would cause the same increase in translations from Western European
languages, and an 83% decrease in GDP per capita would cause the same effect on translations
from Communist languages.
34
We also ran the same regressions with the dependent variable defined as the log of translations per capita; the
results were very similar, if a little stronger.
20
Bertrand, Duflo and Mullainathan (2004) show that difference-in-differences techniques
applied to data with more than two periods generate inconsistent standard errors because they do
not account for serial correlation of the outcomes. To address this critique, we collapse our data
down to one pre-collapse and one post-collapse observation, where the pre-collapse values of the
variables are the averages for the years 1980 to 1989, and the post-collapse values are the
averages for 1992 to 2000. We discard data from 1990 and 1991, considering this the transition
period. Appendix Table E shows the equivalent regressions to Table 1, but run with only these
two observations for each country/original language pair. Our main results remain large and
statistically significant.
Specifically, the increase in Communist translations from Western
European languages when Communism collapsed is significant at the 1% or 5% level in every
specification, and the decrease in translations between Communist countries is significant at the
10% level or better in every specification but one.
Appendix Table F presents the same regressions as Table 1, but replacing Post and its
interactions with a year dummy for each year 1990 and onwards and their equivalent
interactions. This allows the changes that occurred in response to the collapse of Communism to
show an evolving shape over time. Figures 4A and 4B plot the effect of the fall of Communism
on translations and how it changes over time as estimated in column 7 of Appendix Table F.
Figure 4A shows that the positive effect of the fall of Communism on translations from Western
Europe increases until 1993, and then stabilizes for the Soviet satellites. Figure 4B shows that
the negative effect on translations between Communist countries increases until 1993, when it
stabilizes for the Soviet satellite countries.
Figure 5 shows the average of outward translations to Communist or Western European
languages for the three sets of countries: Soviet, Soviet satellite, and Western European. Outward
translations are essentially the mirror image of inward translations. The main point to notice is
that Western European countries did not suddenly become more interested in ideas from the
Communist countries when Communism collapsed. However, again we see that when the
Eastern Bloc fell, Communist countries translated fewer titles from Communist languages,
suggesting that Communist ideas became less appealing to the former Eastern Bloc countries, or
that these countries started writing fewer books.
Table 2 repeats the regressions in Table 1, but with the log of outward translations as the
dependent variable. These regressions confirm what the graphs suggested, that the outward
21
translations from Communist countries fell with the fall of the Eastern Bloc. This effect is
driven by the decrease in translations into Communist languages, which is large and robust to the
various alternative specifications. The magnitude of the effect is similar for Soviet and Soviet
satellite countries.
4.1.2. Comparing Communist countries that transitioned to different degrees
This section compares Communist countries that transitioned to various degrees to
investigate which types of reform affected translation flows. Table 3 presents the results from
OLS regressions that show the relationship between several types of reform in Communist
countries and translations from Western European and Communist languages. The first of each
group of three columns includes the additional controls population and GDP per capita only; here
the coefficients of interest, on the reform variable interacted with the two types of original
language, are identified both off differences between countries and off within-country changes
over time. The second also includes country fixed effects interacted with original language; here
identification is primarily off within-country changes over time. The third in each group of
columns also includes year dummies interacted with original language; here identification is off
differences between countries in changes over time.
The two variables directly related to the political system, institutionalized democracy and
political competition, are both positively and significantly related to translations from Western
European languages. These results suggest that Communist countries that transitioned more
away from Communism experienced a higher jump in Western European translations. The
transition away from Communism consisted of various broad-ranging reforms, and in columns 7
to 9 we test the relative importance of two relevant reforms, namely price and trade
deregulations. The regressions suggest that while trade and foreign exchange system reform was
a more important driving force of increasing translations from Western European languages,
price liberalization was more important in reducing translations from Communist languages.
These results suggest that, while trade barriers kept translations from the West artificially low,
the Communist price control system kept between-communist translations artificially high.
22
4.2. What types of ideas were affected the most by the collapse of Communism?
In this section we investigate how the effect of Communism on book translations varied
by field. First we show the change in translations per capita over time graphically for two fields
that, ex ante, we expect to have been affected very differently by the Communist regime:
religion, and natural science. We then run difference-in-difference regression specifications for
each of the eight fields separately. Finally, we disaggregate further each of the eight fields by
searching the most commonly used keywords in the book titles, grouping these keywords by
subfield such as mathematics, physics and chemistry, and testing the effect of the collapse of
Communism on each subfield.
4.2.1. The effect of the collapse on Religion vs. Exact Science books
Figure 6 shows inward translations in the category of Religion and Theology. Religion
was considered an enemy of Communism, and religious freedom was severely restricted in most
Communist countries.35 Consequently, we expect religion translations to have been few under
Communism. The figure reveals this was indeed the case. When Communism collapsed, Soviet
satellites’ translations of religion books increased dramatically from Western European
languages, and somewhat from other Communist sources. The rapidity of the increase suggests
demand for these translations existed under the Communist regime, but was unable to be
satisfied. Soviet countries’ translations of religious books from Western European languages,
however, increased only a little.
Figure 7 shows inward translations of Natural and Exact Science. Research in exact
science received a lot of government support under the Communist regime because it tended to
be unthreatening to Communism, and was vital for Soviet power on the world stage. Thus we
expect a high level of translations in the Eastern Bloc even under Communism, and a relatively
small increase if any when Communism fell. Indeed, we see that the pre-1991 levels of exact
science translations in both Soviet countries and Soviet satellites were comparable to those in
Western European countries, though the original languages of the titles were largely Eastern as
opposed to Western European. When Communism collapsed, exact science translations between
Communist countries fell away, but were gradually replaced by translations from Western
European languages.
35
Riasanovsky and Steinberg (2005).
23
4.2.2. The effect of the collapse by book field
We next estimate our second specification from Table 1 separately for translations in
each of the eight fields.36 The difficulty that arises in this case is that, because of the smaller
numbers of translations, many of the observations are zero. This is problematic because we are
using a log specification. To deal with this, we run two separate regressions for each field. The
first is a probit that predicts whether the number of translations is positive; the second is an OLS
regression that estimates the log number of translations, and includes only observations for
which the number of translations is non-zero. Panel A of Table 4 presents the coefficients on the
interactions of interest in the probit for each field; Panel B presents the OLS results.
The coefficients on Translations in Communist countries from Communist languages and
Translations in Communist countries from Western languages shed light on the level of
translations of various fields in Communist countries before the collapse of the Eastern Bloc.
Given positive translations, Communist countries pre collapse translated fewer titles from
Western European languages than did Western European countries in every book category.
Conversely, Communist countries translated more Communist titles in every field than did
Western European countries, though the difference is not significant for translations of Religion
and Theology. This latter effect is largest for the categories Law, Social Sciences and Education,
Natural and Exact Sciences, Applied Sciences, and Literature.
However, it is difficult to meaningfully compare the effect of the fall of Communism
between different fields because for each field we must compare both the coefficient in the probit
(the extensive margin) and that in the OLS regression (the intensive margin), and one may be
larger for one field and the other smaller. Thus, for ease of comparison between fields, we also
run (for each field) an OLS regression similar to equation (2) but predicting the log of
translations plus one. Figure 8 plots the coefficients on the two interactions of interest against
each other. The axes in the figure are the coefficients of interest multiplied by 100, which can
approximately be thought of as percentage changes in translation when Communism collapsed.37
36
We omit analysis of the “General” category because of its small size and the difficulty of its interpretation.
When we allow the effect of the fall of Communism to differ for Soviet countries relative to Soviet satellites, the
relative positions of the subjects are similar for the two types of Communist countries, though the points for the
Soviet countries are all shifted to the left.
37
24
The figure shows that the change in translations from Western European languages and
the change from Communist languages are positively correlated across fields. This suggests the
types of ideas that were considered helpful or harmful to the Communist regime tended to be the
same whether the original language was Communist or Western European.
The axes, which show the extent to which inward translations “rebounded” when
Communism collapsed, can be approximately thought of as the extent to which the translation of
such ideas was suppressed under communism. Religion translations, in the top right hand corner
of the graph, were most highly suppressed under Communism. Natural Science translations, in
the lower left hand corner, were the most encouraged under Communism from both types of
language.
Another subject of particular interest is Social Science, which was relatively
suppressed from Western European sources under Communism, but was among the most
encouraged from Communist languages. This seems to suggest that Communist countries had
their own version of Social Science, but they substituted away from it and towards the Western
version when Communism collapsed.
4.2.3. The effect of the collapse by book subfield
While our translation data divide titles into eight aggregate fields, we disaggregate further
each of these eight fields by searching for the most commonly used keywords in the book titles,
grouping these keywords by subfields such as mathematics, physics and chemistry, and testing
the effect of the collapse of Communism on each subfield. In order to consistently categorize
books by keywords in their titles, we focus on titles translated from English (71% of the titles
translated from Western European languages) for which the original title is non-missing (79% of
these titles). To select the keywords for which we search in each field, we first identified the
words that appear most frequently in titles translated in that field (e.g. physics, chemistry, earth,
universe). We then discarded those that select titles that are not primarily on a consistent topic.
To the remaining informative common keywords we added related keywords (only after
verifying that these too returned sets of titles relating to consistent topics).38 We then aggregated
our keyword searches into cohesive subfields.39
38
40
The percentage of titles captured by this
Note our searches also capture variant forms and spellings of the keywords (e.g. British and American spellings),
and obvious typographical errors.
39
The aggregated subfields for each field are as follows. For Religion and Theology: Christian, Judeo-Christian,
Judaism, theology, Islam, Eastern religions; for Education, Social Science and Law: Europe, communism,
25
process ranged from roughly 10% to 55% in the various fields.41 The Keyword List Appendix
lists the keywords contributing to each subfield.
To test which subfields jumped the most post collapse, we run a difference-in-differences
regressions within each field. The coefficients of interest are the interactions of the subfield fixed
effects with Post*Communist.
The results are shown in Tables 5A to 5D. They suggest that even within fields, certain
subfields were discouraged more than others under Communism (i.e. increased more post
Communism). We find that within the field of Religion, books with Christian-related words in
their titles jumped more post collapse than books with Jewish-related and Islamic-related words
in their titles. Within the social science field, books related to economics jumped the most post
collapse, and books related to communism jumped the least. Within exact sciences, mathematics
titles jumped less than titles in physics, chemistry and biology. Medical titles jumped more than
any other titles in the applied science field; engineering titles jumped the least.
4.2.4. The effect of the collapse on translations of influential titles
Table 6 presents the difference-in-differences regression results that use the sample of
highly influential titles, pooling all fields; Table 7 presents these regressions for the different
fields individually.42 We first find that overall Communist translation of titles considered
influential in the West increased sharply post collapse. Second, we find that translations of titles
whose authors voiced anti-Communist opinions jumped more post collapse. Third, we find that
titles written by University professors, especially by Nobel Laureates, jumped more. Fourth, the
effect of the collapse on the translation of influential titles was large in the fields of economics,
economics, capitalism (a strict subset of the economics titles), women; for Natural and Exact Science: mathematics,
physics, chemistry, biology, animals, plants, geology; for Applied Science: computers, business, medical,
engineering, food, gardening. We do not present results from subfield keyword searches in the fields Arts, Games
and Sports, Literature, History, Geography, and Biography, or Philosophy and Psychology because they are largely
uninformative.
40
Notice individual titles might be captured by more than one search, in which case they are attributed to both.
41
The primary reasons why these percentages were not higher were that many titles are uninformative about the
subject of the book (e.g. “Nowhere to Hide” by Susan Francis is an Englishwoman’s story of her life in Iraq in the
time of Saddam Hussein, Allied bombs and chemical warfare), and many others contain only keywords that appear
in multiple contexts (e.g. the keyword “rights” appears Thomas Paine’s classic on democracy “Rights of Man” and
the title “Human Rights Violations In Zaire”.)
42
Appendix Table G presents parallel results to Table 6, but with the dependent variable a dummy for a positive
number of translations instead of the natural log of 1 + the number of countries that translated the title. Appendix
Tables H1 and H2, present the regressions in Table 6 using the two alternative samples of countries and years. The
results in each case are similar.
26
history, political science, literature, philosophy and psychology, but lower for medicine, physics
and biology titles. Fifth, in many fields titles published in the Communist era experienced a large
increase in Communist countries post collapse.
4.3. Other measures of ideas: how did the fall of communism affect the flow of people,
firms and goods?
Naturally, there are other ways to potentially measure the flow of ideas between
countries. For instance, ideas embedded in people are transmitted by tourism and migration,
ideas embedded in firms are transmitted via foreign direct investment (FDI), and ideas embedded
in goods are transmitted by international trade.
We next briefly examine how the fall of
Communism affected the flow of students, tourists and migrants from former Communist
countries to the US; FDI in Communist countries; and imports into Communist countries.
4.3.1. The effect of the fall of Communism on visas granted by the United States to
residents of Communist countries
When the Iron Curtain fell and leaving Eastern Europe became a real possibility for many
citizens, the former Communist countries suddenly became vulnerable to large-scale emigration
and all its consequences. Emigration can affect a country’s access to ideas in a range of ways. If
emigrants are positively selected in their abilities, the country suffers a loss of their human
capital. However, if they acquire new ideas outside the country and transmit these back to
acquaintances who did not emigrate, the country may gain ideas. Additionally, people who leave
temporarily to study or work abroad may bring new ideas with them when they return.
Figure 9 shows visas granted by the United States to residents of Communist and
Western European countries. Despite the complication of the regulations through which the
United States limits entry to foreigners, the figure shows clear increases in both temporary
visitors to the USA from the Eastern Bloc and in permanent migrants after the collapse of
Communism. Visas granted to Soviet and Soviet satellite citizens both increase, though this
increase is more pronounced for the Soviet satellite countries.
27
4.3.2. The effect of the fall of Communism on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI)
Prior to the late 1980s, the economic and legal environments of most Communist
countries were discouraging to FDI. However, with the collapse of Communism many of these
countries began to transition to market economies, and introduced laws aimed specifically at
attracting foreign investment and an inflow of the knowledge embedded in foreign firms. We
next examine the flow of FDI in Communist compared with Western European countries after
the collapse of Communism.
Figure 10 shows the inflow of FDI as a percentage of GDP for the Soviet countries,
Soviet satellites, and Western European countries. Data for the former Communist countries
prior to 1993 are incomplete; the data for this period that do exist suggest a much lower inflow of
FDI in earlier years. However, even post 1993 we see a general upward trend in FDI in the
former Communist countries, especially in the Soviet satellites, which reached levels of FDI
comparable to those in Western Europe in the few years before the explosion of FDI in Western
Europe in 1998.
4.3.3. The effect of the fall of Communism on imports
Under the interpretation that translation is a form of trade in ideas, a natural comparison
for translation is the trade of goods. Trade in the Communist era in Eastern European countries
was overseen by Comecon, and largely consisted of bilateral clearing arrangements between
Communist countries. With the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, the former Communist countries of
Central and Eastern Europe, particularly the Soviet satellites, set about dismantling their barriers
to trade and greatly increased their openness to the West. Here we compare the effect of the fall
of Communism on inward translations from Western European languages with its effect on
imports from Western European countries. The former Communist countries we investigate are
Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and Romania, which are the Communist countries for which
comparable import and translation data are available over our period of interest.
Figure 11 compares the changes over time in imports from Western European countries
as a percentage of GDP into these four Communist countries with such imports into Western
European countries. Imports of the former Communist countries show a small positive jump in
1991 and an upward trend from this date, whereas Western European imports show no distinct
change upon the fall of Communism.
28
Figure 12 shows imports against translations from Western European countries for these
Soviet satellites. Unlike imports, translations jumped substantially in 1991 after Communism
collapsed. This suggests that the flow of ideas is faster to adjust than the flow of goods, perhaps
because greater investments in international relationships and infrastructure are required for
trade.
Table 8 shows parallel regressions predicting translations and imports from Western
European and Communist countries. The first two columns are basic difference-in-differences
specifications controlling for the logs of GDP per capita and population. Relative to Western
European countries, imports and inward translations before the collapse of Communism were
both suppressed in the Communist countries. They were similarly suppressed in the Soviet
nations and in the Soviet satellites. However, translations increased relatively more than imports
when the Eastern Bloc fell; the coefficient on the interaction of Soviet satellites with the post
period is 1.65 in the translation regression and 1.20 in the imports regression.
Both are
significant at the 1 percent level. These regressions show that the Soviet satellites have caught
up to and even surpassed Western European levels of translations and imports (controlling for
their populations and incomes).
Columns 3 and 4 are difference-in-difference specifications that allow a linear time trend
that differs for Communist relative to Western European countries, and that changes differently
for the treatment and control groups upon the collapse of Communism. These regressions
confirm what the figures suggested, that the collapse of Communism corresponded to a large
sudden increase in translations, and to a small increase plus a steepening of the time trend in
imports for the former Soviet satellites.
5. Translations as a measure of the flow of ideas: advantages and limitations
As a measure of the flow of ideas, book translations have both advantages and
disadvantages. One useful aspect is that they are classifiable by type. That is, we know the field
of the book being translated, and so we can categorize the type of idea it contains. From the title
or author of a book, we have the potential to gain even more detailed knowledge of its contents.
Another advantage is that translation flows are driven by the desire to transmit the ideas the
books contain. Furthermore, systematic collection of translation data began in the 1930s in a
number of countries, and the geographic range has expanded over the years, allowing both a long
29
time series and wide coverage for more recent years.
Another useful attribute of book
translations that is particularly important for our study is that they can be attributed to subnational regions of a country. Specifically, we are able to attribute translations in the USSR and
Czechoslovakia prior to their dissolutions to the appropriate constituent nation. In contrast, for
many other measures of idea flows, data for this period are only available at the USSR or
Czechoslovakia level, which does not allow the utilization of within-country heterogeneity, and
makes more difficult comparisons of before the dissolution of these countries with after. Finally,
book translations avoid the need to compare dollar values across countries, as is generally
required when using trade or FDI data. Such comparisons are particularly problematic in the
non-market Communist economies, which are central to our study.
However, book translations have a number of limitations as a measure of the flow of
ideas. They only allow us to measure idea flow across language barriers, which precludes
measuring idea flows between countries that share a language, or between linguistically similar
groups within a country. In addition, counting the number of translated titles does not allow us
to capture the importance of each translated title or the breadth of its circulation. Finally,
translations capture some types of ideas better than others. Because of the delay in writing,
translating, and publishing books, they tend not to capture the very new ideas that appear in
patents. By definition, ideas in books must be codifiable as opposed to tacit. That is, they must
be able to be put into words and written down. Within the range of codifiable ideas, however,
translations capture a wide range of types of knowledge. They capture specific technological
and scientific knowledge, but also what we might call more “social” ideas, such as conceptions
of justice, the relationship between an individual and his government, and so on.
Another alternative measure to book translations that is commonly used in the economics
literature is patent citations, which track the diffusion of particular technological knowledge
across disciplines and geographical space. However, as a measure of the flow of ideas, book
translations differ from patent citations in a few important ways. For instance, the types of ideas
captured by book translations are broader than those captured in patents and thus patent citations.
Additionally, the link between knowledge creation and patents has a strategic element that is
missing from book translations. An inventor who has created a patentable invention is faced
with a strategic decision whether or not to patent it, and the optimal action will depend on the
type of invention and institutional factors such as the strength of intellectual property protection
30
in the country. Hence not all patentable discoveries are patented, and the likelihood of patenting
varies across space, time, and type of discovery. The translation of books is not plagued by this
complication.
Finally, patenting does not occur in countries with weak or nonexistent
intellectual property laws, particularly developing countries. Thus for these countries data on
book translations may exist in meaningful form, whereas data on patent citations may not.
6. Conclusions
We introduce book translations as a measure of idea flows between countries, and use
this measure to test the effect of the fall of Communism in Eastern and Central Europe on the
international transmission of ideas. We find that the collapse of Communism resulted in a
eightfold increase in translations of Western European titles in former Communist countries, and
a fourfold decrease in translation flows between Communist countries. The increase in the
translation of Western European titles was larger for Communist countries that transitioned away
from Communism to a greater degree. Since the end of Communism in Eastern Europe, the
more Western-looking former Communist countries have increased their translations of Western
European titles to levels comparable of those in Western European countries, which is suggestive
of cultural convergence.
Furthermore, we find that the degree to which Communism discouraged translations
varied with the cultural content of the books; for instance, the translation of religious and
philosophy titles was heavily suppressed under Communism, but the translation of scientific
titles was affected to a much smaller degree. We contrast these translation patterns with those in
Western Europe, where translations changed little over this period.
When focusing on a subset of titles considered the most influential, we find a large effect
of the collapse on translation of titles in the fields of economics, history, philosophy, political
science, literature and psychology, but no effect on medicine, biology and physics titles.
Furthermore, translations of titles whose authors voiced anti-Communist opinions, titles
published in the Communist era, and academic titles written by Nobel Laureates experienced a
large increase in Communist countries post collapse.
Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that the Communist regime in Eastern
Europe suppressed the diffusion of ideas across its borders, especially those that were at odds
with Communist ideology. The patterns we find are also consistent with cultural convergence of
31
non-Soviet Eastern and Western Europe, and with little convergence of Soviet and Western
countries.
The effect of Communism on translations could act through a range of different
mechanisms. Specifically, in deciding what titles to publish or translate, the central planning
system balanced several factors: the necessity of preventing the circulation of ideas that could be
damaging to the government or regime, the promotion of ideas that reinforced the regime, and
the provision of books to meet demand (to the extent that demand was known). These artificial
constraints undoubtedly created a gap between the titles translated and those demanded under
Communism. However, demand itself may also have been directly affected by the Communist
regime. First, it may be that people’s intrinsic preferences for types of ideas differ if they are
accustomed to living under a communist regime. Second, the exposure to the West that came
with the fall of Communism may have created demand for Western ideas. Finally, it could be
that the value of some types of ideas changed with the fall of Communism. Separating out the
various mechanisms through which Communism affected the flow of ideas is left for future
research. Another promising idea for future research would be to extend the analysis and test for
the effect on the flow of ideas as reflected in book translations of other key historical events,
such as the Great Depression, Nazism, the Second World War, and the Hungarian revolution.
32
References
Abramitzky, Ran. “The Limits of Equality: Insights from the Israeli Kibbutz,” Quarterly Journal
of Economics, 123:3, 1111-1159 (2008).
Abramitzky, Ran, and Victor Lavy. “How Responsive is Investment in Schooling to Changes in
Returns? Evidence from an Unusual Pay Reform in Israel’s Kibbutzim,” Stanford University
mimeo (2008).
Aghion, Philippe, and Olivier Blanchard, “On the Speed of Transition in Central Europe in
Central Europe,” NBER Macroeconomics Annual Volume 9 (1994).
Alesina, Alberto, and Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln. “Good Bye Lenin (Or Not?): The Effect of
Communism on People's Preferences,” American Economic Review, 97(4) (2007).
Bernstein, Robert, Mark Carroll, W. Bradford Wiley, and Robert W. Frase, Book Publishing in
the USSR: Reports of the Delegations of U.S. Book Publishers Visiting the U.S.S.R. October 21 –
November 4, 1970 August 20 – September 17, 1962, Harvard University Press, Cambridge,
Massachusetts (1971).
Bertrand, Marianne, Esther Duflo, and Sendhil Mullainathan, “How much should we trust
differences-in-differences estimates?” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 119(1) (2004).
Blanchard, Olivier, “Transition in Poland,” The Economic Journal, 104:426 (1994).
Blanchard, Olivier, “Theoretical Aspects of Transition,” The American Economic Review, 86:2,
Papers and Proceedings (1996).
Blanchard, Olivier, The Economics of Post-Communist Transition. Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ.
Press (1997).
Frye, Timothy, and Edward Mansfield, “Fragmenting Protection: The Political Economy of
Trade Policy in the Post-Communist World,” British Journal of Political Science (2003).
Fuchs-Schündeln, Nicola, and Matthias Schündeln. “Precautionary Savings and Self-Selection:
Evidence from the German Reunification 'Experiment,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 120(3)
(2005).
Garton Ash, Timothy (ed), Freedom for publishing, publishing for freedom: the Central and East
European Publishing Project, Budapest: Central European University Press (1995).
Hamilton, Carl, Alan Winters, Gordon Hughes, and Alasdair Smith, “Opening up International
Trade with Eastern Europe,” Economic Policy, 7(14) (1992).
Harrison, Mark, "Economic Information in the Life and Death of the Soviet Command System."
In Reinterpreting the End of the Cold War: Issues, Interpretations, Periodizations, pp. 93-115.
Edited by Silvio Pons and Federico Romero. London: Frank Cass (2005).
33
Holzman, Franklin, International Trade Under Communism- Politics and Economics, New York
(1976).
Jaffe, Adam, Manuel Trajtenberg, and R. Henderson, “Geographic Localization of Knowledge
Spillovers as Evidenced by Patent Citations,” Quarterly Journal of Economics (1993)
Jaffe, Adam, and Manuel Trajtenberg, “International Knowledge Flows: Evidence from Patent
Citations,” Economics of Innovation and New Technology (1999).
Jaffe, Adam, Manuel Trajtenberg, and M. Fogarty, “Knowledge Spillovers and Patent Citations:
Evidence from A Survey of Inventors,” American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings
(2000).
Jaffe, Adam, and Manuel Trajtenberg, Patents, Citations and Innovations: A Window on the
Knowledge Economy. Cambridge: MIT Press (2002).
Jones, Derek (ed.), Censorship: a World Encyclopedia. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn (2001).
Mokyr, Joel. The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy, Princeton
University Press, (2003).
Münich, Daniel, Jan Svejnar, and Katherine Terrell. “Returns to Human Capital Under the
Communist Wage Grid and During the Transition to a Market Economy,” The Review of
Economics and Statistics, 87(1) (2005).
Riasanovsky, Nicholas V., and Mark D. Steinberg, A History of Russia, seventh edition. New
York: Oxford University Press (2005).
Romer, Paul. “Endogenous Technological Change,” Journal of Political Economy 98 (1990).
Romer, Paul. “Idea Gaps and Object Gaps in Economic Development,” Journal of Monetary
Economics 32:3 (1993).
Sin, Isabelle. “Trade in Ideas: What Drives Book Translations?,” Stanford University mimeo
(2008).
Skelly, Eva, and Vladimir Stabnikov, “Russia: a survey of the book market,” The British Council
(1993).
Walker, Gregory, Soviet Book Publishing Policy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
(1978).
34
Figure 1: Translation dates of three influential titles
Figure 2: Treatment and control groups
35
Figure 3
Satellite countries also include the Baltic states, as explained in the text.
36
Figure 4A: The effect over time of the fall of Communism on translations from
Western European languages
The effects plotted are derived from the coefficients in column 7 of Appendix Table F. The figures show
coefficients and 95% confidence intervals on interactions of year dummies with translations in Soviet
countries (left panel) and translations in Soviet satellites (right panel). The three Baltic states are classified
as Soviet satellites, as explained in the text.
Figure 4B: The effect over time of the fall of Communism on translations from
Comunist languages
See the notes for Figure 4A.
37
Figure 5
Note the Baltic states are classified as Soviet satellites, as explained in the text.
Figure 6
Note the Baltic states are classified as Soviet satellites, as explained in the text.
38
Figure 7
Note the Baltic states are classified as Soviet satellites, as explained in the text.
Figure 8
!
Notes: Figure 8 plots the coefficients (multiplied by 100) of the two interaction variables of interest,
Communist i " Post t " WesternLang j (x axis) and Communist i " Post t " CommunistLang j (y axis), from the
regression specification in equation 2 (that also includes controls for log population and GDP per capita)
run separately for each subject. The dependent variable is the log of translations plus one. These
coefficients (approximately) measure the effect (in percentages) of the fall of Communism on translations
! Communist countries (relative to Western European countries).
from Western or Communist languages into
39
Figure 9: Temporary and permanent visas granted by the United States
Figure 10
40
Figure 11
Figure 12
41
Table 1: The effect of the collapse of Communism on book translations in Communist vs. Western European countries
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
Translations from Western European languages in:
Communist countries * post
1.268*** 1.896*** 1.361*** 0.799**
-0.050
(0.283)
(0.269)
(0.233)
(0.344)
(0.296)
Soviet Satellite countries * post
1.741***
(0.323)
Communist countries
-2.608*** -1.739***
-3.371***
(0.484)
(0.498)
(1.056)
Soviet Satellite countries
1.102
(1.076)
Post
0.321**
0.043
0.380**
0.138
0.321**
(0.125)
(0.135)
(0.153)
(0.129)
(0.125)
Translations from Communist languages in:
Communist countries * post
-1.253*** -0.582*** -1.095*** -1.349*** -1.659***
(0.235)
(0.206)
(0.267)
(0.469)
(0.431)
Soviet Satellite countries * post
0.559
(0.435)
Communist countries
1.775*** 2.583***
1.846***
(0.331)
(0.424)
(0.436)
Soviet Satellite countries
-0.102
(0.395)
Post
-0.117
-0.437**
-0.084
0.124
-0.117
(0.157)
(0.160)
(0.174)
(0.191)
(0.157)
Other controls:
Population (ln)
0.545*** -4.541** -8.075**
(0.097)
(1.804)
(2.979)
Real GDP per capita (ln)
1.205*** 0.623**
-0.185
(0.329)
(0.292)
(0.518)
Communist original language dummy
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Country * Communist original language fixed effects
No
No
Yes
Yes
No
Country-specific linear time trends * Communist original language
No
No
No
Yes
No
(6)
(7)
(8)
0.687
0.409
(0.511)
(0.361)
1.337*** 1.183***
(0.410)
(0.325)
-3.249***
(0.905)
1.777**
(0.678)
0.110
0.379**
(0.151)
(0.154)
0.192
(0.607)
0.864
(0.530)
-0.880* -1.354**
(0.482)
(0.492)
0.157
0.221
(0.354)
(0.469)
1.907***
(0.471)
0.573
(0.502)
-0.369**
-0.086
(0.172)
(0.172)
-1.159
(0.784)
-0.276
(0.720)
0.649***
(0.131)
0.814*
(0.438)
Yes
No
No
-2.774*
(1.589)
0.261
(0.300)
Yes
Yes
No
0.135
(0.129)
0.121
(0.191)
-7.799**
(2.853)
-0.217
(0.549)
Yes
Yes
Yes
R-Squared
0.579
0.673
0.921
0.942
0.641
0.764
0.925
0.943
Observations
1,000
964
964
964
1,000
964
964
964
Notes: All columns are OLS regressions. Dependent varable is log inward translations from a Communist or Western European language. "Post" is a dummy for
1991 onwards. The Communist countries used in the analysis are Russia, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, the Ukraine, Bulgaria, the Czech
Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. The Western European countries used are Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, Denmark, Spain, Finland, France,
Iceland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and Sweden. Their corresponding Communist and Western European languages are described in footnote 8 in
the text. We include the three Baltic countries in the Soviet Satellite countries (see explanation in text). No more than two observations in each regression are
dropped for being zero. Standard errors, in parentheses, are clustered at the country level. * p<0.10, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01.
42
Table 2: The effect of the collapse of Communism on book translations out of Communist vs. Western European countries
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
Translations into Communist languages from:
Communist countries * post
-2.122*** -0.899*** -1.856*** -1.165*** -2.362***
(0.264)
(0.298)
(0.245)
(0.182)
(0.535)
Soviet Satellite countries * post
0.345
(0.566)
Communist countries
0.971* 3.034***
1.202
(0.484)
(0.394)
(0.920)
Soviet Satellite countries
-0.334
(0.882)
Post
0.788***
0.188
0.613*** 0.435*** 0.788***
(0.132)
(0.191)
(0.143)
(0.125)
(0.132)
Translations into Western European languages from:
Communist countries * post
-0.060 1.354*** 0.315* 0.481*** -0.262
(0.197)
(0.263)
(0.156)
(0.165)
(0.316)
Soviet Satellite countries * post
0.280
(0.305)
Communist countries
-2.534*** -0.617
-1.843
(0.652)
(0.474)
(1.763)
Soviet Satellite countries
-0.850
(1.774)
Post
0.192 -0.518*** -0.027
0.037
0.192
(0.139)
(0.137)
(0.089)
(0.049)
(0.139)
Other controls:
Population (ln)
1.027***
1.963
2.730
(0.091)
(1.190)
(2.025)
Real GDP per capita (ln)
2.858*** 0.693*** 0.583*
(0.408)
(0.192)
(0.315)
Translations into Communist languages
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Country * translations into Communist language fixed effects
No
No
Yes
Yes
No
Country-specific linear time trends * translations into Communist languages
No
No
No
Yes
No
(6)
(7)
(8)
-1.002* -2.276*** -1.310***
(0.560)
(0.353)
(0.174)
0.097
0.499
0.200
(0.488)
(0.356)
(0.203)
2.599***
(0.343)
0.697**
(0.275)
0.171
0.615*** 0.434***
(0.192)
(0.137)
(0.125)
1.880***
(0.416)
-0.644
(0.449)
-1.745*
(0.984)
1.430
(0.955)
-0.535***
(0.134)
0.026
(0.164)
0.296*
(0.152)
0.435
(0.349)
0.049
(0.340)
-0.025
(0.087)
0.036
(0.049)
1.135***
(0.102)
2.903***
(0.357)
Yes
No
No
2.823**
(1.205)
0.502*
(0.250)
Yes
Yes
No
2.811
(2.054)
0.564*
(0.324)
Yes
Yes
Yes
R-Squared
0.309
0.730
0.956
0.973
0.316
0.751
0.957
0.973
Observations
945
910
910
910
945
910
910
910
Notes: All columns are OLS regressions. Dependent varable is log number of translations out of the country's main language to a Communist or Western European
language. "Post" is a dummy for 1991 onwards. See Table 1 for the Communist and Western European countries used in the analysis. Their corresponding Communist
and Western European languages are described in footnote 8 in the text. We include the three Baltic countries in the Soviet Satellite countries (see explanation in text).
Zero values are dropped (<6% of observations). Standard errors, in parentheses, are clustered at the country level. * p<0.10, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01.
43
Table 3: The effect of the degree of collapse of Communism on book translations in Communist countries
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
Translations from Western European languages interacted with:
Institutionalized democracy
0.299*** 0.223*** 0.139**
(0.031)
(0.021)
(0.046)
Political competition
0.336*** 0.248***
(0.036)
(0.022)
Price liberalization
(6)
(7)
(8)
(9)
0.014
(0.259)
1.091**
(0.376)
0.211
(0.120)
0.419**
(0.144)
0.119
(0.151)
0.375**
(0.172)
-0.426***
(0.110)
0.396**
(0.146)
-0.413*
(0.196)
0.142
(0.230)
-0.210
(0.180)
0.278
(0.236)
0.542*** -4.900**
-3.641 0.669***
(0.083)
(2.065)
(2.252)
(0.075)
1.579*** 0.675** 0.993*** 1.561***
(0.297)
(0.296)
(0.310)
(0.350)
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
No
Yes
Yes
No
No
No
Yes
No
-5.620
(3.858)
0.420
(0.477)
Yes
Yes
No
-6.102
(3.955)
0.552
(0.435)
Yes
Yes
Yes
0.120*
(0.060)
Trade and foreign exchange system reform
Translations from Communist languages interacted with:
Institutionalized democracy
-0.100*** -0.148***
(0.022)
(0.021)
-0.003
(0.031)
Political competition
-0.117*** -0.160***
(0.023)
(0.025)
Price liberalization
Trade and foreign exchange system reform
Other controls:
Population (ln)
Real GDP per capita (ln)
Communist original language dummy
Country * Communist original language fixed effects
Year dummies * Communist original language
0.569*** -4.780**
(0.086)
(2.153)
1.532*** 0.620*
(0.300)
(0.311)
Yes
Yes
No
Yes
No
No
-3.220
(2.363)
0.915**
(0.329)
Yes
Yes
Yes
-0.006
(0.031)
R-Squared
0.489
0.861
0.897
0.501
0.860
0.894
0.691
0.889
0.903
Observations
507
507
507
507
507
507
277
277
277
Notes: All columns are OLS regressions. Dependent varable is log inward translations from a Communist or Western European language. Columns 1-6 are for the years
1980-2000; columns 7-9 are for 1989-2000. The countries used in the analysis are Russia, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, the Ukraine, Bulgaria, the Czech
Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. The Communist and Western European languages are described in footnote 8 in the text. The variables
Institutionalized democracy, Political competition, Price liberalization, and Trade and foreign exchange system reform are measures of aspects of the degree of reform
from communist centrally-planned economy to democratic market economy. They are described in detail in Section 2.2. No more than one observation in each regression
is dropped for being zero. Standard errors, in parentheses, are clustered at the country level. * p<0.10, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01.
44
Table 4: The effect of the fall of Communism on various fields of book translations
Panel A: Probit predicting non-zero inward translations in the field
Natural Sci Applied Sci Social Sci
Translations in Communist countries from:
Communist languages * post
-1.256***
0.399
0.221
(0.339)
(0.286)
(0.532)
Western languages * post
0.992***
1.139***
1.139***
(0.157)
(0.265)
(0.284)
Arts
Literature
Philosophy
Religion
History
-0.330
(0.279)
1.215***
(0.286)
-9.018***
(0.473)
-4.633
.
0.241
(0.259)
1.434***
(0.269)
0.839***
(0.251)
2.003***
(0.372)
-0.551
(0.402)
1.133***
(0.342)
Controls as in Panel B
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Observations
966
966
966
966
966
966
966
966
Philosophy
Religion
History
0.198
(0.300)
2.176***
(0.280)
1.154**
(0.447)
-2.291***
(0.528)
0.889***
(0.171)
2.074***
(0.435)
0.270
(0.417)
-2.164***
(0.704)
-0.841***
(0.242)
1.198***
(0.318)
1.739***
(0.355)
-1.551***
(0.406)
-0.206
(0.215)
0.354***
(0.119)
0.363***
(0.077)
0.574
(0.391)
Yes
-0.223*
(0.119)
0.212
(0.166)
0.344***
(0.108)
0.420
(0.364)
Yes
-0.174
(0.146)
0.186
(0.150)
0.455***
(0.113)
0.841**
(0.320)
Yes
Panel B: OLS predicting log number of inward translations in the field, where translations are non-zero
Natural Sci Applied Sci Social Sci
Arts
Literature
Translations in Communist countries from:
Communist languages * post
-0.767*
-0.362
-1.312*** -0.622**
-0.641**
(0.375)
(0.251)
(0.272)
(0.226)
(0.246)
Western languages * post
0.684*
2.067***
1.762***
0.764**
1.897***
(0.396)
(0.338)
(0.372)
(0.284)
(0.256)
Communist languages
2.445***
3.134***
2.380***
1.144**
2.388***
(0.438)
(0.396)
(0.321)
(0.552)
(0.449)
Western languages
-0.955*
-1.907*** -1.758*** -1.679*** -1.329**
(0.553)
(0.580)
(0.543)
(0.546)
(0.483)
Other controls:
Translations from Communist languages * post
-0.287*
-0.497*** -0.467***
-0.249*
-0.345*
(0.145)
(0.165)
(0.148)
(0.137)
(0.192)
Translations from Western languages * post
0.328*
0.184
0.299**
0.419***
-0.048
(0.167)
(0.129)
(0.130)
(0.124)
(0.167)
Population (ln)
0.435***
0.462***
0.370***
0.441***
0.550***
(0.064)
(0.081)
(0.060)
(0.097)
(0.109)
Real GDP per capita (ln)
0.684
1.072**
0.644*
0.508
1.360***
(0.476)
(0.413)
(0.359)
(0.490)
(0.412)
Translations from Communist languages
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
R-Squared
0.535
0.709
0.606
0.691
0.682
0.718
0.739
0.680
Observations
752
748
824
750
953
717
656
846
Notes: "Post" is a dummy for 1991 onwards. See Table 1 for the Communist and Western European countries used in the analysis. Their corresponding
Communist and Western European languages are described in footnote 8 in the text. The OLS regressions in Panel B drop zero values. Standard errors in both
panels, given in parentheses, are clustered at the country level. * p<0.10, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01.
45
Table 5A: The effect of the fall of Communism on the subfields of Religion
(1)
Post * Communist country
Post * Communist country * Judeo-Christian
Post * Communist country * Theology
Post * Communist country * Islam
Post * Communist country * Judaism
Post * Communist country * Eastern Religions
Post * Communist country * None
0.829***
(0.195)
-0.181**
(0.084)
-0.752***
(0.146)
-0.855***
(0.196)
-0.823***
(0.156)
-1.027***
(0.168)
0.692***
(0.142)
GDP per capita (ln)
Population (ln)
Subfield fixed effects
Communist country * Subfield fixed effects
Post * Subfield fixed effects
Country fixed effects
Yes
Yes
Yes
No
(2)
(3)
0.972***
(0.209)
-0.186**
(0.088)
-0.758***
(0.151)
-0.855***
(0.203)
-0.825***
(0.160)
-1.051***
(0.175)
0.718***
(0.142)
0.264
(0.171)
0.175***
(0.062)
Yes
Yes
Yes
No
0.940***
(0.237)
-0.186**
(0.088)
-0.758***
(0.151)
-0.855***
(0.204)
-0.825***
(0.160)
-1.051***
(0.175)
0.718***
(0.143)
0.471***
(0.162)
-2.415*
(1.230)
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
R-Squared
0.580
0.615
0.717
Observations
3,514
3,388
3,388
Notes: All columns are OLS regressions. Dependent varable is log 1+ inward translations from English in the subfield. Data are annual
and are for 1980-2000. The omitted subfield is "Christian". The subfield "None" denotes the titles not found by any of the subfield
keyword searches. The keywords contributing to each subfield are listed in Appendix Table E. "Post" is a dummy for 1991 onwards. See
Table 1 for the Communist and Western European countries used in the analysis. Standard errors, in parentheses, are clustered at the
country level. * p<0.10, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01.
46
Table 5B: The effect of the fall of Communism on the subfields of Social Science
(1)
Post * Communist country
Post * Communist country * Europe
Post * Communist country * Economics
Post * Communist country * Capitalism
Post * Communist country * Women
Post * Communist country * None
0.193**
(0.079)
0.224*
(0.122)
0.740***
(0.201)
0.261
(0.159)
-0.049
(0.116)
0.884***
(0.265)
GDP per capita (ln)
Population (ln)
Subfield fixed effects
Communist country * Subfield fixed effects
Post * Subfield fixed effects
Country fixed effects
Yes
Yes
Yes
No
(2)
(3)
0.356***
(0.113)
0.214
(0.126)
0.749***
(0.205)
0.243
(0.162)
-0.049
(0.123)
0.879***
(0.270)
0.226
(0.249)
0.296***
(0.052)
Yes
Yes
Yes
No
0.353*
(0.181)
0.214
(0.126)
0.749***
(0.206)
0.243
(0.162)
-0.049
(0.124)
0.879***
(0.271)
0.481*
(0.270)
-1.914
(1.141)
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
R-Squared
0.568
0.644
0.740
Observations
3,012
2,904
2,904
Notes: All columns are OLS regressions. Dependent varable is log 1+ inward translations from English in the subfield. Data are annual
and are for 1980-2000. The omitted subfield is "Communism" The subfield "None" denotes the titles not found by any of the subfield
keyword searches. The keywords contributing to each subfield are listed in Appendix Table E. "Post" is a dummy for 1991 onwards. See
Table 1 for the Communist and Western European countries used in the analysis. Standard errors, in parentheses, are clustered at the
country level. * p<0.10, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01.
47
Table 5C: The effect of the fall of Communism on the subfields of Exact Science
(1)
Post * Communist country
Post * Communist country * Physics
Post * Communist country * Chemistry
Post * Communist country * Biology
Post * Communist country * Animals
Post * Communist country * Plants
Post * Communist country * Geology
Post * Communist country * None
-0.335*
(0.193)
0.241**
(0.108)
0.321**
(0.124)
0.377***
(0.127)
0.549***
(0.175)
0.404**
(0.150)
0.220
(0.131)
0.314
(0.193)
GDP per capita (ln)
Population (ln)
Subfield fixed effects
Communist country * Subfield fixed effects
Post * Subfield fixed effects
Country fixed effects
Yes
Yes
Yes
No
(2)
(3)
-0.092
(0.186)
0.257**
(0.113)
0.349**
(0.127)
0.393***
(0.133)
0.583***
(0.176)
0.448***
(0.150)
0.242*
(0.135)
0.400**
(0.183)
0.469
(0.280)
0.374***
(0.079)
Yes
Yes
Yes
No
-0.141
(0.245)
0.257**
(0.113)
0.349**
(0.127)
0.393***
(0.134)
0.583***
(0.177)
0.448***
(0.150)
0.242*
(0.136)
0.400**
(0.183)
0.553
(0.343)
-1.363
(1.438)
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
R-Squared
0.332
0.500
0.640
Observations
4,016
3,872
3,872
Notes: All columns are OLS regressions. Dependent varable is log 1+ inward translations from English in the subfield. Data are annual
and are for 1980-2000. The omitted subfield is "Mathematics" The subfield "None" denotes the titles not found by any of the subfield
keyword searches. The keywords contributing to each subfield are listed in Appendix Table E. "Post" is a dummy for 1991 onwards. See
Table 1 for the Communist and Western European countries used in the analysis. Standard errors, in parentheses, are clustered at the
country level. * p<0.10, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01.
48
Table 5D: The effect of the fall of Communism on the subfields of Applied Science
(1)
Post * Communist country
Post * Communist country * Business
Post * Communist country * Medical
Post * Communist country * Engineering
Post * Communist country * Food
Post * Communist country * Gardening
Post * Communist country * None
0.247
(0.333)
0.100
(0.284)
0.541**
(0.221)
-0.403
(0.330)
-0.074
(0.334)
0.057
(0.327)
0.696**
(0.310)
GDP per capita (ln)
Population (ln)
Subfield fixed effects
Communist country * Subfield fixed effects
Post * Subfield fixed effects
Country fixed effects
Yes
Yes
Yes
No
(2)
(3)
0.637
(0.381)
0.040
(0.293)
0.508**
(0.228)
-0.465
(0.336)
-0.168
(0.333)
-0.002
(0.334)
0.664**
(0.315)
0.600**
(0.263)
0.370***
(0.067)
Yes
Yes
Yes
No
0.723*
(0.409)
0.040
(0.294)
0.508**
(0.229)
-0.465
(0.338)
-0.168
(0.334)
-0.002
(0.335)
0.664**
(0.316)
1.107***
(0.345)
-2.467*
(1.257)
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
R-Squared
0.538
0.628
0.732
Observations
3,514
3,388
3,388
Notes: All columns are OLS regressions. Dependent varable is log 1+ inward translations from English in the subfield. Data are annual
and are for 1980-2000. The omitted subfield is "Computers" The subfield "None" denotes the titles not found by any of the subfield
keyword searches. The keywords contributing to each subfield are listed in Appendix Table E. "Post" is a dummy for 1991 onwards. See
Table 1 for the Communist and Western European countries used in the analysis. Standard errors, in parentheses, are clustered at the
country level. * p<0.10, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01.
49
Table 6: The effect of the fall of Communism on the translation of influential titles, pooling fields
(1)
(2)
(3)
Post * Communist countries
Communist countries
0.528***
(0.063)
-0.531***
(0.045)
Post * Communist country * Anti-communist author
Communist country * Anti-communist author
0.441***
(0.068)
-0.501***
(0.048)
0.500***
(0.164)
-0.171
(0.116)
Post * Communist country * Nobel laureate
0.468***
(0.066)
-0.504***
(0.047)
(4)
(5)
0.467***
(0.070)
-0.509***
(0.050)
0.423
(0.267)
-0.597***
(0.189)
0.574***
(0.203)
-0.257*
(0.144)
Communist country * Nobel laureate
Post * Communist country * University professor
0.310**
(0.157)
-0.110
(0.111)
Communist country * University professor
Post * Communist country * Published 1917-44
Post * Communist country * Published 1945-85
Communist country * Published 1917-44
Communist country * Published 1945-85
Title fixed effects
Post * Title fixed effects
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
0.033
(0.292)
0.145
(0.278)
0.049
(0.207)
0.079
(0.196)
Yes
Yes
R-Squared
0.721
0.730
0.728
0.725
0.724
Observations
644
644
644
644
644
Number of titles
161
161
161
161
161
Notes: All columns are OLS regressions. Dependent varable is log 1+ number of countries translating the title in the region and period. The
"pre" period is 1980-88; the "post" period is 1989-2000. The countries in the "Communist" region are Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Poland,
Romania, Slovakia, Belarus and Estonia; the countries in the "Western" region are Spain, France, Denmark, Norway, Austria, and Belgium.
Standard errors are given in parentheses. * p<0.10, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01.
50
Table 7: The effect of the fall of Communism on the translation of influential titles, by field
Physics
Biology
Medicine Anthropology History
Regression 1: Basic diff-in-diff
Post * Communist countries
-0.048
0.238
0.275
-0.163
0.456***
(0.274)
(0.315)
(0.515)
(0.340)
(0.120)
Regression 2: Interacting anti-communist author
Post * Communist countries
0.395***
(0.136)
0.272
(0.287)
Post * Communist countries * Anti-communist author
Regression 3: Interacting university professor
Post * Communist countries
Post * Communist countries * University professor
Regression 4: Interacting published 1917-85
Post * Communist countries
Post * Communist countries * Published 1917-85
-0.082
(0.370)
0.082
(0.574)
-0.275
(0.430)
0.340
(0.527)
Sociology
0.352
(0.281)
0.308
(0.324)
0.241
(0.760)
0.429***
(0.136)
0.124
(0.286)
-0.170
(0.570)
0.583
(0.682)
0.405
(0.849)
-0.683
(0.930)
-0.347
(0.527)
0.845
(0.540)
-0.693
(0.948)
1.150
(0.995)
Psychology Philosophy Literature
1.472***
(0.394)
Religion
0.533***
(0.117)
0.688***
(0.145)
0.263
(0.260)
0.520***
(0.138)
0.048
(0.265)
0.419***
(0.145)
1.192***
(0.306)
0.421***
(0.136)
0.414
(0.262)
0.570***
(0.146)
1.212**
(0.469)
0.124
(0.313)
0.508
(0.600)
-0.173
(0.400)
0.771*
(0.418)
-0.693
(0.798)
1.427*
(0.811)
0.732
(0.467)
-0.646
(0.548)
Political Science Economics
0.658***
(0.214)
0.567***
(0.176)
0.552**
(0.263)
0.344
(0.474)
0.347*
(0.179)
0.925**
(0.367)
0.566**
(0.252)
0.397
(0.524)
0.390*
(0.198)
0.743*
(0.406)
-0.382
(0.322)
1.245***
(0.369)
Observations
48
40
16
24
160
44
16
192
124
44
52
84
Number of titles
12
10
4
6
40
11
4
48
31
11
13
21
Notes: All regressions are diff-in-diff specifications and include title fixed effects and their interactions with post. Only the coefficents of interest are presented. Dependent varable is log 1+ number of countries translating the
title in the region and period. The "pre" period is 1980-88; the "post" period is 1989-2000. The countries in the "Communist" region are Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Belarus and Estonia; the countries
in the "Western" region are Spain, France, Denmark, Norway, Austria, and Belgium. Standard errors are given in parentheses. * p<0.10, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01.
51
Table 8: Comparing the effect of the fall of Communism on book translations vs. imports
(1)
(2)
(3)
translations
imports
translations
Communist countries * post dummy
1.653***
(0.277)
1.203***
(0.226)
0.150
(0.163)
0.020
(0.065)
-1.072
(0.729)
-1.083***
(0.191)
0.674
(0.635)
0.481**
(0.202)
1.880***
(0.177)
0.763***
(0.057)
Communist countries * post trend
Post dummy
Post trend
Communist countries
Communist countries * trend
Trend
Real GDP per capita (ln)
Population (ln)
1.403***
(0.463)
-0.059
(0.038)
0.065
(0.135)
0.057*
(0.029)
-0.817
(0.964)
0.048
(0.048)
-0.015
(0.028)
0.641
(0.708)
0.478**
(0.204)
(4)
imports
0.763***
(0.250)
0.082
(0.071)
0.064***
(0.020)
-0.035***
(0.008)
-1.061**
(0.458)
0.006
(0.055)
0.011
(0.009)
1.863***
(0.189)
0.762***
(0.059)
R-Squared
0.458
0.905
0.464
0.909
Observations
309
336
309
336
Notes: All columns are OLS regressions. Dependent variable is log inward translations (columns 1 and 3) or log
value of imports (columns 2 and 4) from Western European countries. "Post dummy" is a dummy for the years
1991 and onwards. "Post Trend" is defined as Post dummy times (year minus 1991). The Communist countries
("treatment" group) included are the ones for which comparable import and translations data are available over our
period of interest, namely Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and Romania. Standard errors, in parentheses, are clustered
at the country level. * p<0.10, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01.
52
APPENDIX
Table A: The effect of the collapse of Communism on book translations in Communist vs. Western European countries: books 49+ pages
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
(6)
(7)
(8)
Translations from Western European languages in:
Communist countries * post
1.332*** 1.964*** 1.441*** 0.866**
0.083
0.822
0.569
0.289
(0.275)
(0.263)
(0.217)
(0.352)
(0.295)
(0.504)
(0.360)
(0.634)
Soviet Satellite countries * post
1.642*** 1.237*** 1.086***
0.820
(0.318)
(0.396)
(0.323)
(0.554)
Communist countries
-2.562*** -1.719***
-3.377*** -3.302***
(0.496)
(0.502)
(1.079)
(0.918)
Soviet Satellite countries
1.176
1.876**
(1.100)
(0.701)
Post
0.269**
-0.015
0.306*
0.105
0.269*
0.053
0.304*
0.102
(0.130)
(0.142)
(0.158)
(0.136)
(0.131)
(0.156)
(0.159)
(0.136)
Translations from Communist languages in:
Communist countries * post
-1.253*** -0.584*** -1.067*** -1.321** -1.637*** -0.861 -1.292** -1.118
(0.234)
(0.200)
(0.263)
(0.480)
(0.457)
(0.505)
(0.513)
(0.814)
Soviet Satellite countries * post
0.525
0.123
0.186
-0.293
(0.462)
(0.382)
(0.490)
(0.751)
Communist countries
1.763*** 2.557***
1.792*** 1.819***
(0.337)
(0.430)
(0.453)
(0.476)
Soviet Satellite countries
-0.042
0.658
(0.412)
(0.519)
Post
-0.101 -0.422** -0.100
0.153
-0.101 -0.354** -0.102
0.151
(0.150)
(0.152)
(0.172)
(0.204)
(0.151)
(0.165)
(0.171)
(0.205)
Other controls:
Population (ln)
0.559*** -4.190** -7.825**
0.669*** -2.589 -7.577**
(0.095)
(1.752)
(2.960)
(0.130)
(1.525)
(2.799)
Real GDP per capita (ln)
1.191*** 0.622**
-0.065
0.795*
0.293
-0.093
(0.336)
(0.298)
(0.517)
(0.436)
(0.303)
(0.546)
Communist original language dummy
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Country * Communist original language fixed effects
No
No
Yes
Yes
No
No
Yes
Yes
Country-specific linear time trends * Communist original language
No
No
No
Yes
No
No
No
Yes
R-Squared
0.563
0.665
0.921
0.941
0.627
0.762
0.925
0.942
Observations
999
963
963
963
999
963
963
963
Notes: All columns are OLS regressions. Dependent varable is log inward translations from a Communist or Western European language, restricting to titles
with 49 or more pages, or that consist of multiple volumes. "Post" is a dummy for 1991 onwards. See the note to Table 1 for the Communist and Western
European countries. Their corresponding Communist and Western European languages are described in footnote 8 in the text. We include the three Baltic
countries in the Soviet Satellite countries (see explanation in text). No more than three observations in each regression are dropped for being zero. Standard
errors, in parentheses, are clustered at the country level. * p<0.10, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01.
53
Table B: The effect of the collapse of Communism on book translations in Communist vs. Western European countries: number of pages translated
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
(6)
(7)
(8)
Translations from Western European languages in:
Communist countries * post
1.223*** 1.822*** 1.352*** 0.716**
0.167
0.882*
0.752**
0.176
(0.258)
(0.252)
(0.211)
(0.343)
(0.274)
(0.479)
(0.343)
(0.622)
Soviet Satellite countries * post
1.377*** 0.973** 0.767**
0.770
(0.301)
(0.374)
(0.314)
(0.535)
Communist countries
-2.398*** -1.648***
-3.226** -3.285***
(0.521)
(0.503)
(1.160)
(0.967)
Soviet Satellite countries
1.197
1.985**
(1.178)
(0.753)
Post
0.301**
0.027
0.318*
0.095
0.301**
0.089
0.317*
0.094
(0.138)
(0.145)
(0.159)
(0.135)
(0.139)
(0.160)
(0.161)
(0.135)
Translations from Communist languages in:
Communist countries * post
-1.240*** -0.619*** -1.056*** -1.362*** -1.473*** -0.738
-1.050*
-1.067
(0.224)
(0.200)
(0.267)
(0.461)
(0.500)
(0.558)
(0.550)
(0.755)
Soviet Satellite countries * post
0.319
-0.082
-0.076
-0.422
(0.504)
(0.440)
(0.512)
(0.696)
Communist countries
1.778*** 2.490***
1.795*** 1.699***
(0.354)
(0.431)
(0.498)
(0.489)
Soviet Satellite countries
-0.025
0.763
(0.442)
(0.519)
Post
-0.147 -0.442*** -0.155
0.102
-0.147
-0.380**
-0.156
0.100
(0.140)
(0.143)
(0.162)
(0.186)
(0.140)
(0.158)
(0.163)
(0.186)
Other controls:
Population (ln)
0.623*** -3.673** -8.701***
0.738*** -2.803* -8.531***
(0.095)
(1.765)
(2.846)
(0.134)
(1.629)
(2.713)
Real GDP per capita (ln)
1.086*** 0.575*
0.024
0.716
0.397
0.007
(0.337)
(0.283)
(0.520)
(0.439)
(0.321)
(0.546)
Communist original language dummy
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Country * Communist original language fixed effects
No
No
Yes
Yes
No
No
Yes
Yes
Country-specific linear time trends * Communist original language
No
No
No
Yes
No
No
No
Yes
R-Squared
0.538
0.664
0.918
0.938
0.592
0.757
0.920
0.939
Observations
999
963
963
963
999
963
963
963
Notes: All columns are OLS regressions. Dependent varable is log number of pages translated from a Communist or Western European language, restricting to
titles with 49 or more pages, or that consist of multiple volumes. Volumes are assigned the mean number of pages for translations in the subject and country.
"Post" is a dummy for 1991 onwards. See the note to Table 1 for the Communist and Western European countries. Their corresponding Communist and Western
European languages are described in footnote 8 in the text. We include the three Baltic countries in the Soviet Satellite countries (see explanation in text). No
more than three observations in each regression are dropped for being zero. Standard errors, in parentheses, are clustered at the country level. * p<0.10, **
p<0.05, *** p<0.01.
54
Table C: The effect of the collapse of Communism on book translations, including translations into Russian in Communist countries
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
(6)
(7)
(8)
Translations from Western European languages in:
Communist countries * post
1.424*** 1.950*** 1.540*** 1.045***
0.697
1.407*** 1.169** 0.874**
(0.234)
(0.210)
(0.204)
(0.274)
(0.438)
(0.414)
(0.436)
(0.377)
Soviet Satellite countries * post
0.974**
0.595
0.494
0.249
(0.453)
(0.380)
(0.394)
(0.371)
Communist countries
-2.349*** -1.647***
-2.588*** -2.409***
(0.405)
(0.408)
(0.781)
(0.593)
Soviet Satellite countries
0.346
0.921**
(0.803)
(0.432)
Post
0.321**
0.087
0.335**
0.151
0.321**
0.117
0.335**
0.152
(0.125)
(0.128)
(0.152)
(0.126)
(0.125)
(0.134)
(0.153)
(0.126)
Translations from Communist languages in:
Communist countries * post
-1.137*** -0.568** -0.963*** -1.267*** -1.221*** -0.469* -0.787** -0.959
(0.189)
(0.215)
(0.227)
(0.406)
(0.229)
(0.243)
(0.299)
(0.599)
Soviet Satellite countries * post
0.119
-0.259** -0.266
-0.433
(0.210)
(0.125)
(0.262)
(0.559)
Communist countries
1.925*** 2.567***
1.988*** 2.107***
(0.316)
(0.366)
(0.399)
(0.446)
Soviet Satellite countries
-0.091
0.484
(0.333)
(0.406)
Post
-0.117 -0.393** -0.129
0.136
-0.117 -0.363** -0.129
0.137
(0.157)
(0.153)
(0.171)
(0.187)
(0.157)
(0.158)
(0.172)
(0.187)
Other controls:
Population (ln)
0.506*** -3.062 -8.182**
0.563*** -2.773 -8.256**
(0.084)
(1.883)
(3.215)
(0.094)
(1.883)
(3.158)
Real GDP per capita (ln)
0.990*** 0.547**
0.174
0.813**
0.490
0.189
(0.271)
(0.244)
(0.476)
(0.335)
(0.317)
(0.487)
Communist original language dummy
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Country * Communist original language fixed effects
No
No
Yes
Yes
No
No
Yes
Yes
Country-specific linear time trends * Communist original language
No
No
No
Yes
No
No
No
Yes
R-Squared
0.656
0.751
0.922
0.942
0.669
0.778
0.923
0.942
Observations
1,000
964
964
964
1,000
964
964
964
Notes: This table duplicates Table 1, but additionally includes translations into Russian in the Communist countries. All columns are OLS regressions.
Dependent varable is log inward translations from a Communist or Western European language. "Post" is a dummy for 1991 onwards. See the notes to Table 1
for further details. Standard errors, in parentheses, are clustered at the country level. * p<0.10, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01.
55
Table D1: The effect of the collapse of Communism on translations of new Western books in Communist vs. Western European countries
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
(6)
(7)
Communist countries * post
1.736*** 2.688*** 2.678*** 1.804***
(0.345)
(0.440)
(0.444)
(0.500)
Soviet Satellite countries * post
Communist countries
-3.130*** -1.798** -1.806**
(0.580)
(0.805)
(0.814)
Soviet Satellite countries
Post
0.440**
(0.210)
1993
1996
Population (ln)
Real GDP per capita (ln)
Country fixed effects
No
0.059
(0.283)
-0.052
(0.321)
0.174
(0.265)
0.772*** 0.773***
(0.177)
(0.180)
1.824*
1.812*
(0.908)
(0.925)
No
No
0.462
(0.415)
0.721*
(0.419)
-7.771
(6.402)
0.982*
(0.530)
Yes
1.002
(0.825)
0.902
(0.813)
-4.107***
(1.382)
1.411
(1.391)
0.440**
(0.213)
No
1.938**
(0.743)
0.440
(0.605)
-3.993***
(1.232)
2.405**
(0.921)
0.170
(0.266)
(8)
1.932**
1.661
(0.749)
(1.081)
0.435
0.173
(0.608)
(0.948)
-4.002***
(1.244)
2.407**
(0.928)
0.061
(0.285)
0.282
(0.266)
0.954*** 0.955***
(0.236)
(0.239)
1.071*
1.060*
(0.584)
(0.593)
No
No
0.450
(0.423)
0.708
(0.423)
-7.115
(5.814)
0.906
(0.557)
Yes
R-Squared
0.424
0.613
0.615
0.962
0.532
0.780
0.782
0.962
Observations
72
70
70
70
72
70
70
70
Notes: All columns are OLS regressions. Dependent varable is log inward translations of titles translated within 15 years of being published, from a Western
European language. Observations are for the years 1985, 1993 and 1996, with the latter two being considered "Post". The countries used are as in Table 1,
where data for the sampled years exist. No more than two observations in each regression are dropped for being zero. Standard errors, in parentheses, are
clustered at the country level. * p<0.10, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01.
Table D2: The effect of the collapse of Communism on translations of old Western books in Communist vs. Western European countries
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
(6)
(7)
Communist countries * post
1.575*** 2.498*** 2.499*** 1.749***
(0.357)
(0.448)
(0.448)
-2.022*** -0.738
(0.539)
(0.790)
-0.736
(0.795)
(0.567)
Soviet Satellite countries * post
Communist countries
Soviet Satellite countries
Post
-0.124
(0.233)
1993
1996
Population (ln)
Real GDP per capita (ln)
Country fixed effects
No
-0.495
(0.307)
-0.476
(0.340)
-0.515*
(0.291)
0.738*** 0.738***
(0.176)
(0.177)
1.763*
1.765*
(0.935)
(0.936)
No
No
-0.001
(0.461)
-0.011
(0.460)
-7.475
(6.464)
1.125*
(0.599)
Yes
0.934
1.843**
(8)
1.844**
1.898*
(0.946)
(0.857)
(0.865)
0.776
0.329
0.330
(0.931)
(0.698)
(0.703)
-3.025** -2.910** -2.908**
(1.181)
(1.057)
(1.066)
1.448
2.401*** 2.400***
(1.182)
(0.784)
(0.790)
-0.124
-0.389
(0.236)
(0.287)
-0.368
(0.303)
-0.411
(0.289)
0.916*** 0.915***
(0.227)
(0.228)
1.039*
1.041*
(0.543)
(0.547)
No
No
No
(0.945)
-0.181
(0.829)
0.011
(0.467)
0.002
(0.465)
-8.159
(6.280)
1.204*
(0.621)
Yes
R-Squared
0.198
0.449
0.450
0.938
0.349
0.683
0.684
0.938
Observations
72
70
70
70
72
70
70
70
Notes: All columns are OLS regressions. Dependent varable is log inward translations of titles translated more than 15 years after first being published, from
a Western European language. Observations are for the years 1985, 1993 and 1996, with the latter two being considered "Post". The countries used are as in
Table 1, where data for the sampled years exist. No more than two observations in each regression are dropped for being zero. Standard errors, in
parentheses, are clustered at the country level. * p<0.10, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01.
56
Table E: The effect of the collapse of Communism on book translations in Communist vs. Western European countries (two-period diff-in-diff)
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
(6)
Translations from Western European languages in:
Communist countries * post
1.389***
2.195***
2.000***
0.443*
1.226**
1.033*
(0.247)
(0.239)
(0.384)
(0.258)
(0.484)
(0.516)
Soviet Satellite countries * post
1.366***
1.006**
1.088**
(0.294)
(0.390)
(0.514)
Communist countries
-2.665***
-1.539***
-3.403***
-3.121***
(0.481)
(0.464)
(1.062)
(0.889)
Soviet Satellite countries
1.066
1.728**
(1.087)
(0.673)
Post
0.271***
-0.055
0.080
0.271***
0.051
0.113
(0.092)
(0.106)
(0.204)
(0.094)
(0.122)
(0.202)
Translations from Communist languages in:
Communist countries * post
-1.205***
-0.358*
-0.553
-1.560***
-0.736*
-0.929*
(0.214)
(0.198)
(0.361)
(0.411)
(0.430)
(0.540)
Soviet Satellite countries * post
0.512
0.153
0.234
(0.432)
(0.305)
(0.554)
Communist countries
1.775***
2.849***
1.805***
2.036***
(0.327)
(0.410)
(0.446)
(0.488)
Soviet Satellite countries
-0.044
0.619
(0.409)
(0.549)
Post
-0.201*
-0.567***
-0.432*
-0.201*
-0.461***
-0.398
(0.114)
(0.137)
(0.239)
(0.116)
(0.150)
(0.234)
Other controls:
Average population (ln)
0.551***
-1.504
0.664***
0.400
(0.082)
(2.245)
(0.126)
(2.902)
Average real GDP per capita (ln)
1.591***
1.372***
1.046**
0.796
(0.345)
(0.468)
(0.440)
(0.524)
Communist original language dummy
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Country * Communist original language fixed effects
No
No
Yes
No
No
Yes
R-Squared
0.641
0.756
0.982
0.699
0.838
0.986
Observations
104
100
100
104
100
100
Notes: All columns are OLS regressions. Dependent varable is log average inward translations from a Communist or Western European language, where the
average is over the years 1980-89 for "pre" observations, and over 1992-2000 for "post" observations. See the note to Table 1 for the Communist and
Western European countries. Their corresponding Communist and Western European languages are described in footnote 8 in the text. We include the three
Baltic countries in the Soviet Satellite countries (see explanation in text). Standard errors, in parenteses, are clustered at the country level. * p<0.10, **
p<0.05, *** p<0.01.
57
Table F: The effect by year of the collapse of Communism on book translations in Communist vs. Western European countries
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
(6)
Translations in Communist countries from:
Communist languages * 1990
-0.760** -0.431
-0.484 -0.668** -0.414
-0.208
(0.324)
(0.330)
(0.311)
(0.301)
(0.321)
(0.336)
Communist languages * 1991
-1.577*** -1.212** -1.352** -1.666** -1.051
-0.844
(0.543)
(0.530)
(0.557)
(0.639)
(0.788)
(0.792)
Communist languages * 1992
-1.167*** -0.646* -0.907** -1.390** -0.636*
-0.633
(0.411)
(0.371)
(0.407)
(0.498)
(0.327)
(0.495)
Communist languages * 1993
-1.222*** -0.499* -0.868*** -1.426** -1.632*
-0.960
(0.378)
(0.264)
(0.305)
(0.556)
(0.935)
(0.824)
Communist languages * 1994
-1.471*** -0.654** -1.085*** -1.745*** -1.434*** -0.575
(0.306)
(0.289)
(0.292)
(0.469)
(0.433)
(0.348)
Communist languages * 1995
-1.362*** -0.716*** -1.129*** -1.825*** -1.587*** -0.997**
(0.223)
(0.207)
(0.222)
(0.533)
(0.388)
(0.435)
Communist languages * 1996
-1.118*** -0.375 -0.890*** -1.666** -1.359*** -0.533
(0.217)
(0.256)
(0.259)
(0.607)
(0.306)
(0.385)
Communist languages * 1997
-1.331*** -0.384 -0.987*** -1.836*** -2.315*** -0.727
(0.268)
(0.291)
(0.294)
(0.639)
(0.341)
(0.656)
Communist languages * 1998
-1.428*** -0.485 -1.050*** -1.911** -2.931*** -1.648**
(0.376)
(0.329)
(0.353)
(0.768)
(0.514)
(0.707)
Communist languages * 1999
-1.327*** -0.503 -1.098*** -2.111** -2.179*** -1.389**
(0.359)
(0.363)
(0.338)
(0.793)
(0.379)
(0.547)
Communist languages * 2000
-1.133*** -0.245 -0.905*** -1.995** -1.928** -0.336
(0.332)
(0.346)
(0.295)
(0.824)
(0.711)
(0.711)
Western languages * 1990
0.060
0.310
0.223
-0.031
0.097
0.225
(0.232)
(0.245)
(0.228)
(0.260)
(0.235)
(0.265)
Western languages * 1991
0.604
0.942** 0.718**
0.330
-0.213
-0.006
(0.423)
(0.346)
(0.322)
(0.419)
(0.763)
(0.779)
Western languages * 1992
1.631*** 2.085*** 1.433*** 0.867**
1.309
1.245
(0.465)
(0.465)
(0.352)
(0.403)
(1.587)
(1.286)
Western languages * 1993
1.507*** 2.162*** 1.672*** 1.011**
0.546
1.152
(0.370)
(0.310)
(0.268)
(0.481)
(0.927)
(0.860)
Western languages * 1994
1.380*** 2.130*** 1.578*** 0.804*
0.360
1.153
(0.341)
(0.331)
(0.263)
(0.444)
(0.638)
(0.701)
Western languages * 1995
1.320*** 1.988*** 1.610***
0.790
0.389
1.001**
(0.250)
(0.231)
(0.206)
(0.466)
(0.297)
(0.479)
Western languages * 1996
1.482*** 2.182*** 1.598***
0.642
0.589
1.373*
(0.304)
(0.291)
(0.264)
(0.548)
(0.673)
(0.695)
Western languages * 1997
1.300*** 2.147*** 1.749***
0.704
-1.082
0.407
(0.420)
(0.409)
(0.303)
(0.550)
(1.064)
(0.741)
Western languages * 1998
1.138** 1.966*** 1.489***
0.433
-1.223
-0.054
(0.410)
(0.383)
(0.346)
(0.621)
(1.091)
(0.839)
Western languages * 1999
1.260*** 1.999*** 1.467***
0.287
0.358
1.066**
(0.346)
(0.348)
(0.254)
(0.639)
(0.268)
(0.510)
Western languages * 2000
1.056* 1.900*** 1.258*** -0.036
-2.409*
-0.860
(0.520)
(0.532)
(0.441)
(0.776)
(1.338)
(1.307)
(continued on following page)
58
(7)
(8)
-0.227
(0.278)
-0.941
(0.750)
-0.646
(0.412)
-1.399
(0.869)
-1.200**
(0.448)
-1.618***
(0.464)
-1.302***
(0.417)
-1.694***
(0.338)
-2.524***
(0.437)
-2.178***
(0.465)
-1.347*
(0.662)
0.172
(0.211)
-0.136
(0.734)
0.788
(0.558)
0.653
(0.670)
0.468
(0.334)
0.415
(0.375)
0.544
(0.514)
0.615
(0.388)
-0.110
(0.590)
0.213
(0.409)
-0.731
(0.862)
-0.388
(0.314)
-1.241
(0.942)
-1.320*
(0.682)
-2.122*
(1.167)
-2.233**
(0.883)
-2.768***
(0.903)
-2.625***
(0.908)
-2.966***
(0.794)
-3.912***
(1.063)
-3.716***
(1.058)
-2.913**
(1.229)
0.044
(0.203)
-0.400
(0.757)
0.153
(0.628)
-0.046
(0.790)
-0.541
(0.637)
-0.662
(0.698)
-0.754
(0.882)
-0.470
(0.742)
-1.294
(0.891)
-1.234
(0.809)
-1.992*
(1.087)
Table F (continued from previous page)
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
Translations in Soviet Satellites countries from:
Communist languages * 1990
(6)
(7)
-0.499** -0.432* -0.532**
(0.233)
(0.235)
(0.226)
-0.791
-0.755
-0.899
(0.968)
(0.958)
(0.985)
-0.677** -0.309
-0.665
(0.325)
(0.580)
(0.455)
0.567
0.350
0.347
(0.930)
(0.794)
(0.902)
-0.049
-0.439
-0.282
(0.404)
(0.300)
(0.451)
0.324
0.053
0.227
(0.393)
(0.303)
(0.439)
0.325
-0.122
0.135
(0.322)
(0.225)
(0.414)
1.238***
0.124
0.533
(0.372)
(0.501)
(0.399)
2.009*** 1.187** 1.595***
(0.510)
(0.504)
(0.472)
1.276*** 0.941*** 1.168**
(0.317)
(0.265)
(0.427)
0.981
-0.198
0.260
(0.699)
(0.514)
(0.681)
-0.053
0.014
-0.086
(0.298)
(0.300)
(0.297)
1.381
1.376*
1.002
(0.822)
(0.766)
(0.787)
0.293
0.661
0.543
(1.595)
(1.216)
(0.560)
1.268
1.051
1.031
(0.931)
(0.761)
(0.671)
1.349**
0.959
1.098***
(0.654)
(0.597)
(0.326)
1.345*** 1.074*** 1.248***
(0.299)
(0.351)
(0.334)
1.105
0.658
1.010*
(0.690)
(0.601)
(0.538)
2.829** 1.715** 1.111**
(1.083)
(0.759)
(0.398)
3.063*** 2.241** 1.794***
(1.093)
(0.839)
(0.578)
1.394*** 1.059*** 1.412***
(0.297)
(0.378)
(0.396)
4.065*** 2.886** 2.204**
(1.351)
(1.321)
(0.891)
Communist languages * 1991
Communist languages * 1992
Communist languages * 1993
Communist languages * 1994
Communist languages * 1995
Communist languages * 1996
Communist languages * 1997
Communist languages * 1998
Communist languages * 1999
Communist languages * 2000
Western languages * 1990
Western languages * 1991
Western languages * 1992
Western languages * 1993
Western languages * 1994
Western languages * 1995
Western languages * 1996
Western languages * 1997
Western languages * 1998
Western languages * 1999
Western languages * 2000
Other controls:
Translations in Communist countries from Communist languages
Translations in Communist countries from Western languages
Translations in Soviet Satelllites from Communist languages
Translations in Soviet Satellites from Western languages
Translations from Communist languages * dummies for years 1990-2000
Translations from Western languages * dummies for years 1990-2000
Population (ln)
Real GDP per capita (ln)
Translations from Communist languages
Country * translations from Communist language fixed effects
Country-specific linear time trends * translations from Communist languages
(5)
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
(8)
-0.537*
(0.305)
-0.980
(1.111)
-0.524
(0.595)
0.470
(1.096)
0.096
(0.730)
0.726
(0.769)
0.794
(0.796)
1.092
(0.736)
2.254**
(0.953)
1.873*
(0.922)
0.972
(1.130)
-0.240
(0.275)
0.721
(0.765)
0.514
(0.545)
0.975
(0.680)
1.284**
(0.498)
1.463**
(0.544)
1.396*
(0.772)
1.205*
(0.663)
1.952**
(0.801)
1.718**
(0.698)
2.332**
(1.065)
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
R-Squared
0.585
0.683
0.929
0.947
0.658
0.777
0.938
0.952
Observations
1,000
964
964
964
1,000
964
964
964
Notes: All columns are OLS regressions. Dependent varable is log inward translations from a Communist or Western European language. See Table 1 for the
Communist and Western European countries used in the analysis. Their corresponding Communist and Western European languages are described in footnote 8 in the
text. We include the three Baltic countries in the Soviet Satellite countries (see explanation in text). No more than two observations in each regression are dropped
for being zero. Standard errors, in parentheses, are clustered at the country level. * p<0.10, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01.
59
Table G: The effect of the fall of Communism on the probability influential titles are translated, pooling fields
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
Post * Communist countries
Communist countries
0.497***
(0.068)
-0.528***
(0.048)
Post * Communist country * Anti-communist author
Communist country * Anti-communist author
0.474***
(0.075)
-0.526***
(0.053)
0.133
(0.180)
-0.009
(0.127)
Post * Communist country * Nobel laureate
0.458***
(0.072)
-0.507***
(0.051)
0.457***
(0.076)
-0.504***
(0.054)
0.222
(0.287)
-0.556***
(0.203)
0.365*
(0.221)
-0.199
(0.156)
Communist country * Nobel laureate
Post * Communist country * University professor
0.199
(0.170)
-0.121
(0.121)
Communist country * University professor
Post * Communist country * Published 1917-44
Post * Communist country * Published 1945-85
Communist country * Published 1917-44
Communist country * Published 1945-85
Title fixed effects
Post * Title fixed effects
(5)
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
0.200
(0.315)
0.329
(0.299)
0.022
(0.223)
0.032
(0.212)
Yes
Yes
R-Squared
0.628
0.629
0.631
0.629
0.632
Observations
644
644
644
644
644
Number of titles
161
161
161
161
161
Notes: All columns are OLS regressions. Dependent varable is a dummy variable for the title was translated in the region and period. The
"pre" period is 1980-88; the "post" period is 1989-2000. The countries in the "Communist" region are Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Poland,
Romania, Slovakia, Belarus and Estonia; the countries in the "Western" region are Spain, France, Denmark, Norway, Austria, and Belgium.
Standard errors are given in parentheses. * p<0.10, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01.
60
Table H1: The effect of the fall of Communism on the translation of influential titles, pooling fields, first alternative sample
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
Post * Communist countries
Communist countries
0.522***
(0.063)
-0.504***
(0.044)
Post * Communist country * Anti-communist author
Communist country * Anti-communist author
0.431***
(0.068)
-0.468***
(0.048)
0.527***
(0.163)
-0.204*
(0.115)
Post * Communist country * Nobel laureate
0.461***
(0.066)
-0.475***
(0.046)
0.475***
(0.070)
-0.486***
(0.050)
0.379
(0.267)
-0.488**
(0.189)
0.585***
(0.202)
-0.273*
(0.143)
Communist country * Nobel laureate
Post * Communist country * University professor
0.239
(0.157)
-0.092
(0.111)
Communist country * University professor
Post * Communist country * Published 1917-44
Post * Communist country * Published 1945-85
Communist country * Published 1917-44
Communist country * Published 1945-85
Title fixed effects
Post * Title fixed effects
(5)
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
0.123
(0.292)
0.164
(0.278)
-0.024
(0.207)
-0.013
(0.196)
Yes
Yes
R-Squared
0.714
0.724
0.722
0.717
0.715
Observations
644
644
644
644
644
Number of titles
161
161
161
161
161
Notes: All columns are OLS regressions. Dependent varable is log 1+ number of countries translating the title in the region and period. The
"pre" period is 1980-88; the "post" period is 1989-96. The countries in the "Communist" region are Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Poland,
Romania, Slovakia, Belarus, Estonia and Russia; the countries in the "Western" region are Spain, France, Denmark, Norway, Austria, and
Belgium. Standard errors are given in parentheses. * p<0.10, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01.
61
Table H2: The effect of the fall of Communism on the translation of influential titles, pooling fields, second alternative sample
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
Post * Communist countries
Communist countries
0.601***
(0.064)
-0.586***
(0.045)
Post * Communist country * Anti-communist author
Communist country * Anti-communist author
0.526***
(0.070)
-0.548***
(0.049)
0.430**
(0.167)
-0.214*
(0.118)
Post * Communist country * Nobel laureate
0.563***
(0.067)
-0.555***
(0.048)
0.559***
(0.071)
-0.563***
(0.050)
0.359*
(0.207)
-0.293**
(0.146)
Communist country * Nobel laureate
Post * Communist country * University professor
0.215
(0.160)
-0.115
(0.113)
Communist country * University professor
Post * Communist country * Published 1917-44
Post * Communist country * Published 1945-85
Communist country * Published 1917-44
Communist country * Published 1945-85
Title fixed effects
Post * Title fixed effects
0.520*
(0.268)
-0.642***
(0.190)
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
-0.051
(0.294)
0.143
(0.279)
0.011
(0.208)
0.081
(0.197)
Yes
Yes
R-Squared
0.708
0.714
0.712
0.710
0.715
Observations
644
644
644
644
644
Number of titles
161
161
161
161
161
Notes: All columns are OLS regressions. Dependent varable is log 1+ number of countries translating the title in the region and period. The
"pre" period is 1980-88; the "post" period is 1989 and 1995-2000. The countries in the "Communist" region are Bulgaria, Czech Republic,
Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Belarus, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and Moldova; the countries in the "Western" region are Spain, France,
Denmark, Norway, Austria, Belgium, Finland and Iceland. Standard errors are given in parentheses. * p<0.10, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01.
62
Keyword list appendix: Keywords contributing to each subfield
This appendix lists the keywords that contribute to each subfield search. Note alternative forms
and spellings of the words are also included (except where explicitly stated that they are
excluded), and variations in capitalization and hyphenation are ignored.
Religion
Christian: jesus, christ, lord, angel, cross, crucify, pope, papacy, satan, evangelism, catholicism,
protestantism, orthodoxy, baptism, lutheranism, anglicanism, methodism, adventism,
pentecostalism, mormonism, jehovah
Judeo-Christian: bible, testament, genesis, god (excluding “gods”)
Theology: theology, religion
Islam: muslim, islam, koran, muhammad, allah
Judaism: judaism, jew, talmud, torah, yetzirah, kabbalah
Eastern Religions: tibet, tao, buddhism, dhammapada, zen, hindu, krishna, sikhism, jaina,
zoroastrian, yin, yang, confucius, shinto, eastern (excluding titles that include the string “christ”)
Social Science
Europe: europe, western
Communism: communism, socialism, marxist
Economics: economics, macroeconomics, monetary, inflation, microeconomics, business, profit,
trade, market, finance, marketing, capitalism, corporate, money, accounting, management
Capitalism (subset of Economics): capitalism, profit, market
Women: woman, feminism, gender, female, feminine
Exact Science
Mathematics: math, mathematics, matrix, calculus, number, geometry, algebra, equation,
statistics, probability, pi
Physics: physics, thermodynamics, quantum, astrophysics, electricity, electromagnetic,
geophysics, meteorology, newton, weather, astronomy, planets (plural form only), star, black
63
hole, cosmos, universe, big bang, solar system, sun, space-time, space, relativity, einstein,
feynman, quark
Chemistry: chemistry, biochemistry
Biology: biology, microbiology, cell, dna, biotechnology, zoology, genetics, evolution, darwin,
species, botany, physiology, human body
Animals: animal, animal-watching, bird, birdfeeder, birdhouse, birdkeeper, birdlife, birdwatching, mammal, insect, butterfly, wildlife, cat, cat-watching, fish, fishing, whale, shark, dog,
dog-watching, elephant, reptile, dolphin, moth, spider, creatures, bear, chimpanzee, kingfisher,
snake, snake-keeping, horse, horselore, horse-watching, crocodile, tiger, amphibian, wolf, gorilla,
ape, panda, fauna, from, porpoise, penguin, jaguar, alligator
Plants: flora, plant, tree, flower, forest, mushroom, herb, fern, wood, woodland
Geology: geology, earthquake, volcano, rock, mineral, tectonic
Applied Science
Computers: microsoft, windows, macintosh, programming, computer, internet, server, software,
database, photoshop, dbase, excel, ms-dos, wordperfect, lotus, autocad, linux, adobe
Business: business, marketing, sales, salesman, selling
Medical: doctor, patient, medicine, medical, medication, medical-surgical, treatment, disease,
disorder, dental, obstetrics, radiology, psychiatry, psychology, surgery, pediatric, physiology,
physiotherapy, psychotherapy, anatomy, diagnosis, clinic, birth, pregnancy, health, healthcare,
remedy, depression, nursing, heart, heartbeat, cancer
Engineering: engineer
Food: cookery, cookbook, cook, wine, winebook, winemaker, winespeak, winetasting, winewise,
food
Gardening: garden, plants, herbs, flowers
64