Does Misery Love Company? Analyzing the Global Suffering Inflicted by US Economic Sanctions

Abstract

Abstract Economic sanctions are coercive policies capable of inflicting social, political, and humanitarian suffering that go far beyond their economic effects alone. The United States employs economic sanctions more than any other government in the world. In this study, we analyze how US sanctions policies can inflict misery upon the states they target. Our contributions to the literature are two-fold. First, we introduce a new, consolidated measure called the Freedom from Misery index to capture the disparate, adverse effects of sanctions on socioeconomic and political conditions within target states. Second, we offer the first empirical analysis of the extent to which sanctions imposed by the United States increase the misery gap between the United States and targets of US sanctions. We theorize that high-cost sanctions and, counterintuitively, human rights sanctions will inflict significant amounts of misery on the states they target. Using data from 1971 to 2015 for over 145 countries, we conduct quantitative analyses to evaluate the degree that US sanctions, including those involving the United Nations, contribute to miserable living conditions in their targets. We find that US sanctions, particularly those inflicting major costs on targeted economies and those imposed for human rights reasons, immiserate their targets’ populations. Extensions of our main analysis further show that US sanctions widen the misery gap between the United States and target states, contributing to greater international inequality.