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Info Service on UN Sustainable Development (Jul25/09) Penang, 25 Jul (Kanaga Raja) — A new study published in the British medical journal The Lancet Global Health has revealed that unilateral economic sanctions are causing 564,258 deaths around the world each year, similar to the total death toll from wars, including civilian casualties. The study, titled “Effects of international sanctions on age-specific mortality: a cross-national panel data analysis”, said that most of the sanctions-related deaths in the five decades after 1970 were children under the age of five. The study was co-authored by Mark Weisbrot, an economist and co-director of the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR); Francisco Rodriguez, a senior research fellow at CEPR and a professor at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School; and Silvio Rendon, an economist at CEPR. The study is the first to examine the effects of sanctions on age-specific mortality rates in cross-country panel data using methods designed to address causal identification in observational data. According to the authors, the “results illustrate how the effects of sanctions on mortality generally increase over time, with longer-lived sanctions episodes resulting in higher tolls on lives.” In their cross-national panel data analysis, the authors analysed the effect on health of sanctions using a panel dataset of age-specific mortality rates and sanctions episodes for 152 countries between 1971 and 2021. Their findings showed a significant causal association between sanctions and increased mortality. Significantly, while the authors found “the strongest effects for unilateral, economic, and US sanctions,” they found “no statistical evidence of an effect for UN sanctions.” They found that children under five made up 51% of total deaths due to sanctions over the 1970-2021 period, with most deaths (77% over the same period) being aged 0-15 and 60-80. Sanctions have substantial adverse effects on public health, with a death toll similar to that of wars, the authors emphasised in their study. “Our findings underscore the need to rethink sanctions as a foreign-policy tool, highlighting the importance of exercising restraint in their use and seriously considering efforts to reform their design,” they concluded. “It is immoral and indefensible that such a lethal form of collective punishment continues to be used, let alone that it has been steadily expanded over the years,” said study co-author Mark Weisbrot, in a CEPR press release. “And sanctions are widely misunderstood as being a less lethal, almost non-violent, policy alternative to military force,” he added. “We have seen economic sanctions – especially those imposed by the US – contribute substantially to economic collapse in targeted countries, such as Venezuela,” said study co-author Francisco Rodriguez. “Sanctions often fail to achieve their stated objectives and instead only punish the civilian populations of the targeted countries. It is well past time that the US, EU, and other powerful actors in the international community seriously reconsider this cruel and often counter-productive mechanism,” he added. According to the authors of the study, international sanctions are restrictions on international transactions imposed by governments in pursuit of foreign policy objectives. They said that whether sanctions affect health conditions in target countries and whether these impacts are strong enough to cause a substantial number of deaths are among the most contentious issues in contemporary thinking on economic statecraft. Discussions in the 1990s on the effects on child mortality of sanctions on Iraq strongly influenced policy debates and were one of the main drivers of the subsequent redesign of sanctions on the Government of Saddam Hussein, they noted. The authors said sanctions can lead to reductions in the quantity and quality of public health provision driven by sanctions-induced declines in public revenues; decreased availability of essential imports, resulting from sanctions-induced reductions in foreign exchange earnings, which limit access to medical supplies, food, and other crucial goods; and constraints on humanitarian organisations, through real or perceived sanctions-induced barriers that hinder their ability to operate effectively in target countries. “Concern with the humanitarian effect of conventional cross-cutting sanctions regimes has prompted numerous reform initiatives over the years,” they noted. Despite these initiatives, the use of economic sanctions has grown substantially in recent decades. According to calculations made using the Global Sanctions Database (GSDB), 25% of all countries were subject to some type of sanctions by either the USA, the EU, or the UN in the 2010-22 period, by contrast with an average of only 8% in the 1960s, said the study. This increase is driven by the growth of sanctions that have the claimed aim to end wars, protect human rights, or promote democracy, said the authors. In their study, the authors focused on sanctions imposed by three countries or organisations that can be expected to have substantial effects: the USA, the EU, and the UN. “We expect European and US sanctions to have substantial effects given the size of their economies and the fact that most world trade and financial transactions are carried out using the US dollar or the euro.” They distinguished between economic sanctions, which are those that restrict trade or financial transactions, and non-economic sanctions, which are those that deal with arms trade, military assistance, travel, or other issues. The authors also distinguished between sanctions that are imposed unilaterally by the USA or the EU, and those imposed concurrently with a multilateral UN sanctions regime on the same target. Applying a range of methods designed to address causal questions using observational data, the authors estimated that unilateral sanctions over the 2010-21 period caused 564,258 deaths per year. “This estimate is higher than the average annual number of battle-related casualties during this period (106,000 deaths per year) and similar to some estimates of the total death toll of wars including civilian casualties (around half a million deaths per year).” The authors also estimated the evolution of deaths caused by global sanctions for each age segment over time. The largest incidence of global sanctions occurred in children younger than 1 year, followed by the 60-80 years age segment, they said. Altogether, deaths of children younger than 5 years represented 51% of total deaths caused by sanctions over the 1970-2021 period. The study noted that most deaths (77% over the same period) were in the 0-15 years and 60-80 years age groups, implying that the bulk of the mortality effects falls on groups that are traditionally not in the labour force. CONCLUSIONS The authors found a significant adverse effect of economic and unilateral sanctions on mortality rates in target countries. These results are consistent with those of previous research, which has also found significant negative effects of sanctions on various indicators of living conditions in targeted countries, including economic growth and health outcomes, they said. The authors said that these findings raise an important question for policy debates – “what role, if any, should economic and unilateral sanctions have in the foreign policies of the countries or organisations imposing them?” This question is particularly pertinent given the substantial increase over time in the use of these sanctions, they added. “The fraction of the world’s economy subject to unilateral sanctions, for example, has grown from 5.4% in the 1960s to 24.7% in the 2010-22 period.” The authors said one finding of potential relevance for debates on sanctions reform is their result that, although unilateral and economic sanctions are positively associated with increases in mortality, UN sanctions are not. They said a possible interpretation of this finding is that this difference is a result of the greater public scrutiny that decisions of the UN, a deliberative body with participation of target countries, are naturally subject to. “Nevertheless, interpreting this finding with caution is important. In many of our estimations, the point estimates for the UN sanctions coefficient are positive, even if not statistically significantly different from zero,” they said. Thus, the authors said “although the evidence does not allow us to reject the hypothesis that UN sanctions have no effect on mortality, it also does not allow us to reject the alternative hypothesis that they have a quantitatively significant adverse effect.” There are various reasons why UN sanctions could be expected to have effects that are more difficult to identify in cross-national data, according to the study. One of them is that unilateral sanctions imposed by the USA or the EU might be designed in ways that have a greater negative effect on target populations, said the authors. Most – although not all – UN sanctions regimes in recent decades have been framed as efforts to minimise their impact on civilian populations, although the extent to which they have achieved this goal remains debated, they added. The study said that US sanctions, in contrast, often aim to create conditions conducive to regime change or shifts in political behaviour, with the deterioration of living conditions in target countries in some cases being acknowledged by policy makers as part of the intended mechanism through which objectives are to be attained. The USA – and, to a lesser extent, Europe – also has important mechanisms at its disposal that serve to amplify the economic and human effects of sanctions, including those linked to the widespread use of the US dollar and the euro in international banking transactions and as global reserve currencies, and the extraterritorial application of sanctions, particularly by the USA, said the authors. “Woodrow Wilson referred to sanctions as “something more tremendous than war”. Our evidence suggests that he was right. Over the past decade, we estimate that unilateral sanctions caused around 560,000 annual deaths worldwide. It is hard to think of other policy interventions with such adverse effects on human life that continue to be pervasively used,” the authors concluded. +
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