US sanctions kill half a million people a year worldwide

According to a study conducted by scientists, sanctions imposed against countries lead to an increase in mortality rates. Researchers, including Francisco Rodríguez, Silvio Rendón, and Mark Weisbrot, analyzed data from 152 countries over the period from 1971 to 2021. Using various analytical methods such as entropy balancing and Granger causality, they established a connection between the imposition of sanctions and increased mortality among different age groups.

Unilateral sanctions lead to loss of life

The most negative impact is observed from unilateral economic sanctions, particularly those imposed by the United States. In contrast, sanctions imposed by the UN did not show a statistically significant effect on mortality rates. The authors of the study explain this by the fact that UN decisions, made with consideration of the opinions of targeted countries, are subject to more rigorous public scrutiny.

Mortality from sanctions varies by age group: it increases by 8.4% (with a 95% confidence interval from 3.9 to 13.0) for children under five years old and by 2.4% (from 0.9 to 4.0) for individuals aged 60–80 years. The youngest population groups turned out to be the most vulnerable.

Analysis of temporal dynamics showed that the negative consequences of sanctions on mortality increase over time. For example, for infants, the mortality rate increases by 5.8% in the first three years after the imposition of sanctions, 8.1% between 4 and 6 years, and 10.0% after seven years or more.

Half a million victims annually

The researchers estimated that unilateral sanctions could be associated with the deaths of 564,258 people each year (with a 95% confidence interval from 367,838 to 760,677). This number is comparable to the casualties resulting from global armed conflicts and exceeds the average number of combat-related deaths (106,000 deaths per year).

Children suffer the most from sanctions: 51% of all deaths related to sanctions from 1970 to 2021 are children under five years old. Overall, 77% of all fatalities belong to the age groups 0–15 and 60–80 years, which are traditionally not considered to be of working age.

The study utilized data from the Global Sanctions Database (GSDB), which is the most comprehensive and up-to-date collection of information on sanctions. The study included sanctions imposed by the US, the European Union, and the UN, which can have a significant impact due to their large economic size and the role of their currencies in international trade.

How sanctions work

Sanctions affect public health through several mechanisms. First, they lead to a reduction in the quality and quantity of public healthcare services due to decreased budget revenues. Second, access to critically important imported goods, such as medicines and food, is restricted due to limitations on currency inflows.

Sanctions also create barriers for humanitarian organizations, which face real or perceived obstacles to their effective operations in sanctioned countries.

American sanctions have particularly destructive effects for several reasons. The US often designs sanctions with the aim of changing the regime or political behavior of targeted countries, which is sometimes perceived as an acceptable price for achieving political goals.

There are also mechanisms that exacerbate the negative economic and humanitarian consequences of sanctions, including the use of the dollar and euro in international transactions and the extraterritorial application of sanctions, especially by the US.

Increase in the use of sanctions

In recent decades, the use of economic sanctions has significantly increased. According to the Global Sanctions Database, 25% of countries were subjected to various sanctions from the US, EU, or UN between 2010 and 2022, while in the 1960s this figure was only 8%.

The share of the global economy exposed to unilateral sanctions has risen from 5.4% in the 1960s to 24.7% in 2010–2022. This increase is associated with the imposition of sanctions aimed at ending wars, protecting human rights, or promoting democracy.

The study also demonstrated the varying impacts of different types of sanctions. Unilateral sanctions had a significant impact on all age groups, while UN sanctions had no statistically significant effect, and in one analysis even showed a negative value.

Sometimes economic sanctions had a stronger impact than non-economic ones when both types were analyzed simultaneously. However, there is one age group (60–80 years) for which non-economic sanctions had a significant effect.

Research methods

In their study, the authors applied a range of methods aimed at examining causality using observational data. Entropy balancing employed reweighting to reproduce the characteristics of experimental control groups. Event studies analyzed the evolution of effects over time.

Granger causality tests investigated temporal precedents, while instrumental variables used exogenous sources of variation as natural experiments. For unilateral sanctions, the researchers applied measures of similarity in foreign policy positions between targeted countries and sanctioning countries.

These instruments were constructed based on indices of foreign policy preferences developed by Bailey, Strezhnev, and Foeten, who used a dynamic spatial model to estimate the ideal points of countries and time based on voting in the UN General Assembly from 1946 to 2022.

Ethical aspects

The results of this study raise important questions about the role of economic and unilateral sanctions in international politics. This issue becomes particularly relevant in light of the increasing use of such sanctions in recent years.

The normative assessment of the impact of sanctions depends on the ethical frameworks used for their analysis. The data from this study can aid in this important discussion by providing quantitative estimates of human losses.

From a human rights perspective, evidence that sanctions lead to loss of life should be sufficient grounds for abandoning their use. From a consequentialist viewpoint, such evidence should be considered alongside data on how effective sanctions are in achieving their goals.

The data from this study also contribute to a broader discussion about redesigning sanctions to mitigate their negative humanitarian consequences. It is important to note that despite the association of unilateral sanctions with increased mortality, UN sanctions do not have the same effect.

This finding may be explained by the more rigorous public scrutiny that UN decisions, as an advisory body, are subjected to.

Limitations of the study

The limitations of this study are related to the use of non-experimental data to assess political interventions. The authors detailed the limitations of each method, including potential biases and discrepancies in estimates due to unobserved confounding factors.

The instruments used by the authors are plausibly exogenous determinants of unilateral sanctions and do not correlate with non-sanction-related factors affecting mortality. There are no obvious channels through which foreign policy positions could influence domestic health conditions.

While it is possible that a country's foreign policy stance may be associated with poor public policy decisions that could also lead to increased mortality, the coefficients obtained by the authors retain their significance in most specifications.

The nature of sanctions has changed over time, and the recent increase in their use suggests that the criteria for their imposition may differ from those used in previous decades.

Woodrow Wilson said that sanctions are "something worse than war." The results of the study confirm this statement, showing that in the last decade, unilateral sanctions have caused about 560,000 deaths annually worldwide. It is difficult to find other political measures with such negative consequences for human life that continue to be used.

AI Opinion

From a data analysis perspective, this study raises an interesting paradox of modern diplomacy: sanctions, which act as a tool of "soft power," have effects comparable to the consequences of military conflicts. Historical examples, from Napoleon's continental blockade to the economic isolation of South Africa during apartheid, confirm this trend. Each generation of humanity faces a moral dilemma: is it permissible to inflict suffering on the innocent to achieve political goals?

Macroeconomic analysis also highlights the complexity of the issue. Sanctions create a "shadow economy" in international relations—parallel payment systems and new trade routes. The paradox is that attempts to isolate certain countries may promote the integration of others. Perhaps the primary long-term effect of sanctions will not be a change in the policies of targeted countries, but the fragmentation of the global financial system into competing blocs.

Source: hashtelegraph.com