Armenia will continue active cooperation with the International Science and Technology Center

ArmInfo. Armenia will continue active cooperation with the

International Science and Technology Center. The draft agreement on the continuation of the activities of the center was ratified by the Armenian parliament at the meeting on September 12.  According to Samvel Harutyunyan, Chairman of the State Committee on Science, the agreement on the continuation of the Center's activities was signed on December 9, 2015 in Astana. Armenia since 1994 is a member of the center, which was founded in 1992. The center was created by Russia, the US, the countries of the European Union, followed by Japan, South Korea, Canada, and a number of other countries. After the destruction of the USSR, a situation has developed in which a significant part of scientific personnel was forced to emigrate to other countries, central financing was stopped.

As a result, a number of states, including Armenia, found themselves in a very difficult situation. In Soviet times, Armenian science received 400 million rubles a year. Given the financing by Moscow of individual programs related to the military-industrial complex and the development of nuclear power, the total investment amounted to about 600 million rubles. As a result, Armenian science produced serious results.  A number of programs were of an applied nature, including programs at the Yerevan Institute of Physics, the financing of which was estimated at 40 million rubles.

After the collapse of the USSR, the International Science and Technology Center became one of the main donors of Armenian science, which allowed to avoid collapse. The total volume of investments in the Armenian science from the Center's side was about $ 45 million, for which more than 170 scientific papers were funded with a total coverage of about 1,700 scientists. But in 2015, Russia withdrew from the Center, followed by Belarus. As a result, the structure began to gradually turn into a venture fund, which began to pay more attention to projects with the prospect of their further commercialization.  The continuation of the center's activities will allow Armenia to fill the budgetary funds provided to Armenian science, which make up 0.25% of the country's GDP. "Within the framework of cooperation with the European Union, Armenia has joined its grant program for innovation -" Horizon - 2020 ", but one does not interfere with one another: European partners even value the ISTC's rich experience in several post- Soviet republics," Samvel Karapetyan added.