Topic 7: Economic Sanctions

data to take note of

- 20% of the time when sanctions are threatened/ in the threatening stage, the target backs down without sanctions ever even being imposed - a majority of sanctions last less than a year

If sanctions are inefficient, why engage in sanctions?

- Inefficiency puzzle

Are all threats of sanctions imposed?

- No, about half of threatened sanctions are never actually imposed

Are sanctions related to the sanctioner's policy concessions?

- No, sanctions are unrelated to policy concessions

Example of narrow economic sanctions

- Recent sanctions of west against Russia

Costly Signals senders example

- Uncertainty over a sender's resolve who wishes to pursue sanctions. If a sender imposes economic sanctions, this shows the target the strength of the sender because they are willing to pursue sanctions. -target worries about seeing stronger economic sanctions and war

Have sanctions become more popular over time?

- Yes. There's a huge spike of economic sanctions after the Cold War and 1990. - It is believed that sanctions will continue to increase overtime because sanctions are viewed as an alternative to war and because trade overtime is become more popular...more trade going on leads to more economic vulnerability.

Costly signals

- costly signals reveal the legitimate weakness of actors because the signals are expensive and so only resolved actors will be willing to pay the signals and not the less resolved types - states have reason to misrepresent their strength however costly signals reveal their strength

Threat & imposition of economic sanctions database (TIES)

- created to address the selection problem -looks at when economic sanctions were both imposed and threatened -covers 1412 cases from 1945 to 2005

What is the purpose of sanctions?

- sanctions restrict trade in some way in order to win policy concession

Removing Leaders from power

- sanctions target a winning leader's coalition because it forces the people who chose that leader to change their opinion of that leader and pressure the leader to give into the sender's policy concessions

Selection problems

- selection problems occur when strategic actions determine whether outcomes appear in a dataset - biases estimate on casual relationships - ex: news only talks about sanction crises, not sanctions that do work because those sanctions are strong to begin with - the sanctions we observe in practice are usually weaker than the average hypothetical sanction and so we cannot estimate the effectiveness of sanctions by only looking at observed sanctions because an actor has strategically selected into being sanctioned

Why is that the only sanctions seen to be imposed are the weakest sanctions?

- the strongest sanctions in theory deters the target from escalating and forces them to back down meaning that they'll never show up in dataset

When are trade sanctions most effective?

- trade sanctions are most effective when a lot of people are on your team (hard to keep states together) - all trade could potentially disappear for the person being sanctioned against

Example of broad economic sanctions

-Cuba because for the last 5 decades the US has cut exports to Cuba

The inefficiency of sanctions

-Economic sanctions are inefficient because trade is efficient. (Living in an autarkic world is not sufficient)

Incentives to misrepresent

-weak actors want to pretend they are strong to convince other parties to do what they want