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Project

Economic Analysis of Impact of International Sanction Policies.

Economic sanctions are an important tool of foreign policy. They are used to punish foreign country governments or try to change their policies without resorting to military force. Recent examples are sanctions against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Iran’s nuclear program. There is surprisingly little research on how effective these sanctions are. This project wants to address several important gaps in the literature and to contribute insights on: 1) the effectiveness of targeting. Sanctions are assumed to be most effective when they are targeted to hurt the group in power. However, sanctions might fail to hit their desired target because (a) they are too blunt to target any particular group; (b) the targeted group may be able to avoid the sanctions; (c) the targeted group might be able to use its power to shift the impact to less powerful groups; 2) how sanctions affect the countries that impose sanctions. For example, trade sanctions not only affect the target country but also business and consumers at home, and these impacts may be large; 3. how sanctions may stimulate corruption and illegal trafficking, which are undesirable side-effects of sanctions. This research project will develop better theoretical frameworks to analyse these effects and use innovative data and methods to estimate the effectiveness and costs of targeting, using the recent sanctions against Iran and Russia as case studies.

Date:1 Jan 2018 →  31 Dec 2021
Keywords:Economic sanctions, Effectiveness
Disciplines:Applied economics