Book translations as information flows: How detrimental was Communism to the flow of ideas?*

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