Saturday, October 10, 2009: 4:35 PM
Ioana M. Petrescu, Ph.D.
,
School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, College Park, MD
Economic sanctions are often criticized on the grounds that they have negative humanitarian effects on the civilian population of the sanctioned country. There is a heated debate on what should be the balance between achieving foreign policy goals using economic sanctions and the adverse effects of sanctions on human rights. In order to find such a balance, one needs to know whether such negative humanitarian effects exist and what their magnitudes are. Despite the heated debate on this topic, there is surprisingly little empirical evidence of the humanitarian impacts of economic sanctions. In this study, I attempt to fill this gap in the literature by investigating the effects of economic sanctions on child mortality and height in a cross-country micro analysis.I use child level data from 68 developing countries from the Demographic and Health Surveys and data on economic sanctions and their characteristics from Hufbauer et al. 2007[i]. I use economic sanctions that were imposed for reasons other than war in order to avoid distinguishing between the effects of wars and the effects of sanctions on child mortality. The sample contains 28 such sanctions. I also eliminate any children born during famines or wars (sanctioned or not sanctioned) for the same reasons. I use only children who are between 0 and 5 years old. Using this sample, I construct various measures of child exposure to sanctions: the child is born during a sanction episode, number of months the child was exposed to sanctions in early childhood (0-3 years old), and number of months of in utero exposure to sanctions conditions. Then, I estimate the effects of these measures on the probability that the child will die before age 5 and on child height z score.I find that economic sanctions have the largest negative impact on children exposed to sanctions in utero. If a child is exposed to such a sanction in utero for all the 9 months of the pregnancy, then he is more likely to die by 0.9%. The magnitude of this effect increases with the economic costs of the sanction. The magnitude also varies with other characteristics of the sanction. I don’t find significant effects of sanctions on child height.These results have important policy implications. If economic sanctions that impose small costs to the sanctioned countries can be used effectively to achieve foreign policy goals, then these sanctions are more desirable from a humanitarian point of view. Also economic sanctions should be accompanied by humanitarian aid targeted towards pregnant women.
[i] Hufbauer, G., Schott, J., Elliott, K., 2007. Economic Sanctions Reconsidered, 3rd edition, Institutefor International Economics, Washington, DC.
