Effectiveness Of Economic Sanctions: Empirical Research Revisited

Abstract

This paper reexamines economic sanctions research and identifies explanatory variables used by many previous theoretical and empirical research studies on the effectiveness of voluntary and non-voluntary economic sanctions since World War I.

A normative legal, political, and economic methodology is used to measure effectiveness of economic sanctions as a random walk process.  The paper concludes that choosing a target and imposing economic sanctions is a random process that occurs when a sender is faced with a real or perceived threat.  Sanctions are imposed as an alternative to inaction or going to war.  The theory and research on effectiveness of sanctions has been a mere exercise in running regressions on a series of random numbers and do not shed any light to guide policymaking.