Skip to main content

The Debate on Economic Sanctions

Since the last century, the era of military wars appears to have come to an end, leading the global community on a quest to find alternative ways of conflict resolution and protecting international law. One of these ways is imposing economic sanctions on other countries. These are restrictions or outright ban on trade, currency flows or investments from the other country. 


But do economic sanctions achieve their objective? 


History tells us that arguably, the answer to this question is that they don't. Formerly imposed sanctions on countries like Iraq, Iran, North Korea and recently, Russia, indicate that these sanctions not only turn out to be inefficient in barring the sanctioned countries from violating international peace, but also prove detrimental to other countries who are dependent on the sanctioned countries for necessities like food supplies, oil, etc. For instance, the recent imposition of economic sanctions on Russia by the US in the light of the Ukrainian war caused the oil prices in the international market to escalate, but did not compel Russia to cease the war with Ukraine.





In today's era of economic interconnectedness and geo-political complexity, it is not feasible for vulnerable countries to pull themselves out of mutually beneficial free trade, thus turning the idea of economic sanctions into a double-edged sword.


In addition to that, countries who anticipate retaliatory global response to their actions, prepare themselves for the consequences of these sanctions beforehand, and are thus able to evade them in certain ways. 


However, on the other side of the coin, these sanctions do represent a swift reaction from the international community to the acts of aggression committed by countries, as in the case of Russia. Moreover, they are also seen as a peaceful alternative to military use.


But whether they act as an efficient instrument of international policy or lead to the disruption of the global economy, will depend on specific circumstances. Nevertheless, the debate continues.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

THE IDEA OF UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME

In the previous article, we mentioned that Universal Basic Income has been proposed as one of the solutions to the paradox of welfare. Here, we explore what the idea is, its empirical feasibility and the possible hurdles in its implementation. Imagine that one fine morning, you get up and hear the news that the government would now transfer a certain amount of money, every month, in every citizen’s bank account, irrespective of one’s existing employment status, without it getting taxed. This is exactly what the Universal Basic Income would mean! By definition, the UBI is a financial support system that gives a certain minimum amount of money to everybody in the economy, which is needed for the fulfilment of one’s basic needs. However, there exists no consensus on what form this minimum basic income would take, or what amount is necessary for minimum subsistence. Nonetheless, this ambitious social policy is being increasingly viewed as an alternative to the existing system of welfare p...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Not-So-Normal Story of Normality

Being students of economics, we have been made to study the Z table excessively throughout our statistics journey. Hence, before going off the Z table, we decided to explore more about the Z table itself.  In other words, having learned its technical use in solving a wide variety of statistical problems, we now delve into the interesting history of the normal distribution, unarguably the most popular distribution in modern statistics. The distinctive characteristics of symmetricity and bell-shaped structure impart normality a wide range of real-life applications in physics, biology, finance, hydrology, etc. Abraham DeMoivre Interestingly, the major credit for the origin of the normal distribution, also called the Gaussian distribution, does not go to Carl Gauss, but rather to Abraham de Moivre,  a mathematician and a contemporary of Isaac Newton. He used to plot the results of multiple binomial distribution simulations. Consequently, he discovered a pattern that resembled a be...
Post a Comment
Read more