Efficacy in Global sanctions
The broad economic and financial restrictions that have been imposed on countries like Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela limit their ability to raise revenue, trade internationally, and access foreign markets. This, in turn, affects citizens’ economic wellbeing and reduces the government’s capacity to spend on social programs.
But sanctions are also difficult to design and implement. Their effects can be hard to gauge, since they are often imposed without any formal demand and do not necessarily always have the desired impact (for example, the CoCom embargo against the Soviet Union was successful in limiting technology exports but did not contribute to regime change). In addition, some of the more narrowly focused sanctions that have been imposed over the past decades may be easier to judge, such as those targeting terrorism or proliferation, whose objectives were mostly realized.
Finally, domestic groups with vested interests in maintaining sanctions can develop and make it difficult for sanctioning governments to relax them once goals are achieved or objectives change. Sugar manufacturers in the United States, for instance, developed an interest in keeping the Cuban embargo intact in order to bolster their market share against more efficient Cuban sugar producers.
For these reasons, assessments of the effectiveness of sanctions require a comprehensive dynamic view of the situation, which is difficult to obtain from existing datasets. The GSDB provides this, by allowing researchers to analyze the nature of the sanctions objectives and how these have changed over time.
