We review a number of developments and trends in the literature on economic sanctions. We discuss salient contributions to the theoretical literature, data collection, and empirical work on the ...impact, effectiveness and success of sanctions in Economics and Political Science. Our interdisciplinary perspective highlights the existence of a stark contrast in the ways the two disciplines view and analyze sanctions. Taking advantage of this perspective, we identify potential directions for future work. Most importantly, we argue that moving toward a better understanding of the causes and consequences of economic sanctions requires a much tighter integration of concepts from Political Science and Economics and a more extensive interdisciplinary collaboration.
The primary objective of this paper is to develop a two-country, dynamic, general equilibrium model with innovation contests to formally analyze the impact of globalization on the skill premium and ...fully-endogenous growth. Higher quality products are endogenously discovered through stochastic and sequential global innovation contests in which challengers devote resources to R&D, while technology leaders undertake rent-protection activities (RPAs) to prolong the expected duration of their temporary monopoly power by hindering the R&D effort of challengers. The model generates intra-sectoral trade, multinationals, and international outsourcing of investment services. Globalization, captured by a move from autarky to the integrated-world equilibrium, leads to convergence of wages and growth rates. Globalization and long-run growth are either substitutes or complements depending on a country’s relative skill abundance and the ranking of skill intensities between RPAs and R&D services. Trade openness between two countries that possess identical relative skill endowments but differ in size does not affect either country’s long-run growth.
We build a model of R&D-based growth in which the discovery of higher-quality products is governed by sequential stochastic innovation contests. We term the costly attempts of incumbent firms to ...safeguard the monopoly rents from their past innovations rent-protecting activities. Our analysis (1) offers a novel explanation of the observation that the difficulty of conducting R&D has been increasing over time, (2) establishes the emergence of endogenous scale-invariant long-run innovation and growth, and (3) identifies a new structural barrier to innovation and growth. We also show that long-run growth depends positively on proportional R&D subsidies, the population growth rate, and the size of innovations, but negatively on the market interest rate and the effectiveness of rent-protecting activities.
In his seminal work on tariff retaliation, Johnson (Review of Economic Studies, 21, 1953–1954) showed that a country will “win” a bilateral “tariff war” if its relative monopoly/monopsony power in ...world trade is sufficiently large. However, it is unclear from Johnson's analysis and from subsequent research on the subject how this power is determined in general economic environments. An important goal of this paper is to address this issue. With the help of a neoclassical trade model in which country size is at centre stage, it is shown that a sufficient condition for a country to prefer a non-cooperative Nash tariff equilibrium (retaliation) over free trade is that its relative size be sufficiently large. The paper also refines the structure of the general trade model and generates additional characterization results on the importance of country size for best-response tariff functions, retaliatory tariffs, and welfare.
We construct a three-country model to determine how the formation of free trade areas (FTAs) affects optimal tariffs and welfare. We find that, at constant rest of the world (ROW) tariffs, the ...adoption of internal free trade induces union members to reduce their external tariffs below the Kemp–Wan J. Int. Econom. 6 (1976) 95–97 level, and causes ROW's terms of trade to improve and its welfare to rise. When ROW also behaves optimally, its policy response to the formation of the FTA is to raise tariffs. Generally, FTA members prefer to liberalize internal trade partially and find regional integration appealing only if their collective size is sufficiently large. We also demonstrate how FTAs may undermine the attainment of global free trade.
The global sanctions data base Felbermayr, Gabriel; Kirilakha, Aleksandra; Syropoulos, Constantinos ...
European economic review,
10/2020, Volume:
129
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This article introduces the Global Sanctions Data Base (GSDB), a new dataset of economic sanctions that covers all bilateral, multilateral, and plurilateral sanctions in the world during the ...1950–2016 period across three dimensions: type, political objective, and extent of success. The GSDB features by far the most cases amongst data bases that focus on effective sanctions (i.e., excluding threats) and is particularly useful for analysis of bilateral international transactional data (such as trade flows). We highlight five important stylized facts: (i) sanctions are increasingly used over time; (ii) European countries are the most frequent users and African countries the most frequent targets; (iii) sanctions are becoming more diverse, with the share of trade sanctions falling and that of financial or travel sanctions rising; (iv) the main objectives of sanctions are increasingly related to democracy or human rights; (v) the success rate of sanctions has gone up until 1995 and fallen since then. Using state-of-the-art gravity modeling, we highlight the usefulness of the GSDB in the realm of international trade. Trade sanctions have a negative but heterogeneous effect on trade, which is most pronounced for complete bilateral sanctions, followed by complete export sanctions.
Economic Sanctions Morgan, T. Clifton; Syropoulos, Constantinos; Yotov, Yoto V.
The Journal of economic perspectives,
2023, Volume:
37, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Taking an interdisciplinary perspective, we examine the evolution of economic sanctions in the post-World War II era and reflect on the lessons that could be drawn from their features and patterns of ...use. We observe that, during this time, there has been a remarkable increase in the use of sanctions as an instrument of foreign policy. We classify this period into four 'eras' and discuss, in this context, how the evolution of sanctions may be linked to salient features of the contemporaneous international political and economic orders. Our review of the related literatures in economics and political science suggests, among other things, that our understanding of sanction processes could be significantly advanced by marrying these perspectives. We conclude by identifying several questions and challenges, and by discussing how interdisciplinary research could address them.
We analyze a dynamic, two-country model that highlights the various trade-offs each country faces between current consumption and competing investments in its future productive and military ...capacities as it prepares for a possible conflict in the future. Our focus is on the circumstances under which the effects of current trade between the two countries on the future balance of power render trade unappealing to one of them. We find that a positive probability of future conflict induces the country with less resource wealth to “prey” on the relatively more “prudent” behavior of its larger rival, and more so as conflict becomes more likely. While a shift from autarky to trade always raises the current incomes of both countries, the smaller country realizes the relatively larger income gain from trade and also devotes a relatively larger share of its income gain towards arming. Our analysis shows that the larger country rationally chooses not to trade today when the difference in initial resource wealth is sufficiently large and is more likely to prefer autarky when the probability of future conflict is higher.
This paper studies preferences of customs union (CU) members over common external tariff (CET) levels and extends the literature on delegation decisions over trade policy in models with production. ...In a model with similar CU members, we prove that most-preferred CETs can be ranked with the help of compensated price elasticities of import demand functions. In the Heckscher-Ohlin trade model, we show these elasticities depend on inter-country differences in relative factor endowments and inter-sectoral differences in technology. This helps identify the optimal policy maker in a CU and demonstrates delegation decisions over trade policy can be integrated into mainstream trade theory.
We study the impact of economic sanctions on international trade in the mining sector. We demonstrate that the gravity equation is well‐suited to model bilateral trade costs in mining and find that ...sanctions have been effective in impeding mining trade. Complete trade sanctions have reduced mining trade by about 44% on average. We also document significant heterogeneity in the sanctions effects on mining trade across industries, sanction episodes/cases, depending on the sanctioning and sanctioned countries, the type of sanctions, and the direction of trade. We take a close look at the impact of recent sanctions on Iran and Russia.
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