Autocracies resist sanctions, wealth protects from economic bans
A Banque de France working paper finds that autocratic regimes display diverging resilience to international sanctions. The study reveals that wealth protects targets from economic sanctions but not from aid suspensions, due to the difficulty of evasion.
Single-party regimes prove resilient
The study corroborates the superior resistance of single-party regimes and monarchies to sanctions pressure.
Econometric analysis on original data, featuring aid suspensions as a stand-alone category, confirms institutional solidity as a determinant of regime stability under challenging economic conditions.
While less institutionalised types like personalist regimes face difficulties weathering the impact of sanctions, democracies are found to be more vulnerable to sanctions pressure than non-democracies, with vulnerability increasing with the level of freedom in the target country.
This finding suggests that the closer a regime moves up the democracy scale, the more susceptible it becomes to sanctions pressure, irrespective of its specific autocratic type.
Evasion hypothesis confirmed
The paper investigates whether aid suspensions behave similarly to economic sanctions when applied to different autocratic types.
It hypothesises that wealth protects autocracies less from aid suspensions than from other sanctions because their effects are harder to evade.
Test results uncover a nuance: affluence strengthens target resistance to economic sanctions but not to aid suspensions.
This confirms the evasion hypothesis: while alternative trade routes can offset a ban on trade with a set of senders, substitute donors for aid are rare, making aid suspensions more difficult to circumvent for target countries.
The research highlights that the marginal role often ascribed to aid suspensions in mainstream sanctions scholarship is unwarranted.
A crucial distinction for policymakers
This research provides a critical distinction between the effectiveness of economic sanctions and aid suspensions, addressing a long-standing gap in international relations scholarship.
The finding that wealth offers no protection against aid suspensions is highly relevant for designing more effective and targeted foreign policy tools.
However, the study's reliance on data up to 2018 may limit its applicability to the rapidly evolving geopolitical landscape and new forms of sanctions.