“During the 1990s and 2010s, collaborative research and academic mobility across nations increased considerably. The impact is more visible in middle-income countries with growing research communities, such as in Latin America, Africa and more acutely in Asia. Language, cultural, and political barriers tended to be overcome, and funding diversity increased across disciplines and research areas,” says Dr Balán.

“However, more recently, global political tensions and changes in trade agreements have slowed down funding for research. Though in Latin America, the economic forecast is more optimistic, raising expectations among universities.”

However, the forecast doesn’t look as great everywhere in Latin America, with Argentina’s economy experiencing unprecedented trouble and the political climate in Mexico hurting the research community .

“In Mexico. the current Government under López Obrador has reduced the science budget to 0.35 percent of GDP, one of the lowest among middle income countries like Mexico,” says Dr Alma Maldonado, who researches education policy, globalisation and academic mobility at Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados in Mexico City. “In times of crisis in developing countries, one of the first areas cut is research. However, developed countries try to maintain the budget for scientific research specifically. This is one reason some counties maintain consistently good research output, and others fall behind.”

According to Dr Maldonado, private and public funding for research in Mexico is at its lowest rate ever.

“We have struggled at my institution the last five years, sometimes even with the basics like drinking water. It’s an extreme policy of austerity enacted by a populist government that is more akin to a right-wing one than the left-wing one it claims to be,” says Dr Maldonado. “This ideological matter goes beyond funding, too. The current director of the Council for Research, María Elena Álvarez Buylla, believes things like bioengineering should be prohibited. This not only kills research careers but could negatively impact the farming sector too.”

Dr Maldondo highlights the dangers of funding systems which rely too much on the whim of one or few individuals, whose ideological motivations might make or break a research project. That issue is not exclusive to Mexico or even less affluent nations though, the United States is famously individualistic, which brings with it opportunities as well as pitfalls.

“I initially found the US system of academic capitalism and the predominance of private money tremendously refreshing,” says Professor Anton Schweizer, art historian from Kyushu University. “After some time, I realised that it puts scholars and entire institutions at the mercy not just of politicians, who might suddenly and drastically cut public support for esoteric research in the arts and humanities, or the general economic climate - a stock market crisis can pretty much render a department broke if it invested its endowment to the wrong stocks - but also of individuals, who never lack their own agenda.”

While some, who research hard-to-fund things, might be lucky and find individuals with a keen interest to fund that specific research, they also run the risk of losing that stream with little to no forewarning.

In contrast to the US, researchers working in China operate within a very different kind of social, political, and economic system

“China has a broader toolkit of state-backed funding vehicles than many other countries, adopting a holistic approach to industrial policy. And universities there rely on government funding for a significant 64 percent of their science research activities, as of 2021,” says Laura Gormley, a research analyst with Rhodium Group, an independent research firm providing research and analysis on the economy and politics of China. “We are seeing slow growth constraining government revenues on top of pre-existing local government fiscal crunches, putting pressure on this funding structure. In the face of economic woes, institutes relying heavily on government funding will be some of the most vulnerable players in China’s research ecosystem.”

As Dr Balán mentioned earlier, the landscape of global trade is shifting. Tensions between the US and China have led the Chinese government to prioritise sectors with strong commercial prospects to boost economic growth and to become self-reliant in sectors with vulnerable supply chains and customer markets, namely high-tech sectors. But research of low strategic value, notably the arts and humanities, may not be so lucky, the downside of a mostly centralised and nearly monolithic funding system.

“At a broad level, China will face challenges trying to grow a thriving innovation ecosystem, which requires diverse and complimentary research activities across industries and types of research. But in the face of economic constraints, resources will be allocated to a narrower set of sectors, those at a high priority level for economic and national security,” said Gormley. “It is important to note, though, that science and tech funding remains a top priority of the Chinese government and we don't think that there will be a decrease in total funding allocated to research, just slower than average growth in funding.”

The consensus seems to be, for any researcher, over dependence on a single funding source can be detrimental, and generally, science, medicine, and research easier to commercialise will be more robust to volatile funding environments. A mix of funding from different bodies is probably a good idea. Though this could require researchers to become experts in marketing themselves if they’re expected to approach private funding channels or society more directly, alongside more traditional sources of funding.