Do economic sanctions ever work? #Shorts

Source:
Hufbauer et al. (2009); Economic Sanctions Reconsidered, 3rd Edition

Do economic sanctions ever work?

A key research paper found that sanctions were at least partially successful 34 percent of the time.

They found that sanctions can work, but it really depends on what you're trying to achieve.

For smaller objectives, sanctions can be quite effective.

For example, in 1988, the United States threatened to withhold economic aid from El Salvador, and successfully stopped them from releasing prisoners.
Sanctions were much less effective at stopping a country's military operations, where they only worked around 20 percent of the time.

A country is very unlikely to stop an action that it views as vital to its national security, no matter how heavy the economic costs are.

However, it's difficult to say exactly how often sanctions work, because they primarily act as a deterrent.

The threat of future sanctions may have stopped any number of wars before they even started.

Once a country has gone to war, it's already decided it's willing to accept the economic consequences, so it usually takes stronger action to achieve the desired result.

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[levialexandercrossan]

- what you're explaining with the ones that were most effective not showing in stats is a great example of survivorship bias