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 global sanctions data base Felbermayr, Gabriel; Kirilakha, Aleksandra; Syropoulos, Constantinos ...
European economic review,
10/2020, Letnik:
129
Journal Article
Recenzirano
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, Letnik:
37, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
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 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.
We analyze how trade openness matters for interstate conflict over productive resources. Our analysis features a terms-of-trade channel that makes security policies trade-regime dependent. ...Specifically, trade between two adversaries reduces each one's incentive to arm given the opponent's arming. If these countries have a sufficiently similar mix of initial resource endowments, greater trade openness brings with it a reduction in resources diverted to conflict and thus wasted, as well as the familiar gains from trade. Although a move to trade can otherwise induce greater arming by one country and thus need not be welfare improving for both, aggregate arming falls. By contrast, when the two adversaries do not trade with each other but instead trade with a third (friendly) country, a move from autarky to trade intensifies conflict between the two adversaries, inducing greater arming. With data from the years surrounding the end of the Cold War, we exploit the contrasting implications of trade costs between enemies versus trade costs between friends to provide some suggestive evidence in support of the theory.
Inspired by the increased interest in economic sanctions and their consequences, this special issue contains a collection of studies by experts aiming to reflect the recent developments and trends in ...the literature on economic sanctions. The contributions contain theoretical research on the topic, data collection, and empirical work on the impact, effectiveness and success of sanctions. Moreover, the contributions come from economists and political scientists and are, therefore, interdisciplinary in nature. In this introduction, we highlight each paper in the volume by summarizing its salient features and by placing them in the broader context of the literature on economic sanctions. We also synthesize several takeaways and conclude by identifying questions we believe future research should shed further light on.
We explore theoretically and empirically the relationship between intraindustry trade and the skill premium. Our model features a Chamberlinian-type mechanism of income distribution based on ...quasi-homothetic consumer preferences, non-homothetic production, and factor-biased scale economies at the firm level. The analysis focuses on a two-country, one-sector model of intraindustry trade with two factor inputs consisting of high-skilled and low-skilled labor. We find that a move from autarky to free trade (a) raises the output of the representative firm and its level of total factor productivity, and (b) reduces (raises) the relative wage of high-skilled workers under the hypothesis of output-skill substitutability (output-skill complementarity). Plant-level evidence from Mexico supports the empirical relevance of the proposed income-distribution mechanism.
Do Sanctions Affect Growth? Kwon, Ohyun; Syropoulos, Constantinos; Yotov, Yoto V
IDEAS Working Paper Series from RePEc,
01/2022
Paper
Odprti dostop
Direct measures of the economic impact of sanctions are contaminated by the endogeneity that arises when other events in target countries (e.g., civil or interstate conflicts, political independence, ...etc.) instigate the imposition of sanctions. To address this issue, we propose a novel instrument, sender’s aggressiveness, captured by the number of sanctions imposed in a given year. After establishing the validity of this instrument, we quantify the impact of sanctions on growth in sanctioned states and show that, on average, an additional sanction decreases contemporaneous real GDP per capita in target states by 0.39 percent. We also substantiate the presence of a significant (in magnitude) downward bias in the corresponding OLS estimates and demonstrate that the effects of sanctions on growth vary widely depending on the types of sanctions considered, their purported objectives, measures of their success, and the duration of their effects.
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