As Economics Sanctions Spread, LeBow Experts Chart Their Growth and Assess Their Impact
How does the world look different from six years ago? Beyond the elections, coups, wars and other conflicts that dominate headlines, economic sanctions — penalties applied by governments to other countries, organizations and even individuals — have grown considerably:
- In 2020, 320 economic sanctions were in force around the world.
- By 2025, there were 828.
- More than a third of the nearly 1,800 sanction cases recorded since 1949 began in the last six years.
These measures have become widespread tools for governments to influence the actions of others, and scholars in LeBow’s School of Economics are cataloging their adoption and analyzing their impact, including the findings above, through the Global Sanctions Data Base (GSDB), a widely-cited resource housed at LeBow’s Center for Global Policy Analysis (CGPA).
Royal H. Gibson, Sr. Term Professor of Economics Yoto Yotov, PhD, and Trustee Professor of International Economics Constantinos Syropoulos, PhD, have led the development of the GSDB, along with a number of international collaborators: Gabriel Felbermayr, PhD, of the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU) and President of the Austrian Institute of Economic Research (WIFO); Heider Kariem of WU and WIFO; Erdal Yalcin, PhD, of HTWG Konstanz – University of Applied Sciences; doctoral alumna Aleksandra Kirilakha, PhD ’22; current doctoral candidate in economics John Chen; and former LeBow professor Ohyun Kwon.
“Sanctions have become the instrument of first resort for governments that want to respond to aggression, atrocities or nuclear proliferation without using force,” says Yotov.
“Our goal with the GSDB is to give researchers, policymakers, journalists and students the same comprehensive and transparent record of what has been tried, against whom and with what results.”
The GSDB’s latest release, the fifth since its launch in 2020, is its most extensive, covering nearly 1,800 sanction cases from 1949 to 2025. For the first time, it also records the month in which most sanctions were imposed and lifted, and it adds a separate module on financial sanctions.
This module, along with an accompanying paper, “Financial Sanctions and International Trade: Insights from New Data,” finds the number of sanctions in force more than doubling since 2020, and financial sanctions — asset freezes, restrictions on payment-service infrastructure, restrictions on aid, restrictions on investment, restrictions on financial services and other types — nearly tripling, from 218 cases in 2020 to 607 in 2025. Today, nearly three in four sanction cases in force include a financial measure, up from one in seven in 1950.
In particular, payment restrictions — such as cutting a country off from the SWIFT network for international bank payments — “exert large, negative, and highly statistically significant effects on trade, comparable in magnitude to the effects of complete trade sanctions,” the researchers find. Unlike sanctions on goods, they also reduce the sanctioned country’s trade with third countries that did not impose them.
Financial sanctions have become the tool of choice because they are fast, flexible and easy to target. But some of them, such as payment restrictions, are far from surgical: their effects spill over to countries that never imposed them.
Yotov observes that for many years, the trends in global trade had been toward increased free trade, or liberalization. Since the mid-2010s, he says, the pendulum has been swinging in the opposite direction, characterized by sanctions, tariffs and other barriers.
“As economists, we developed mathematical models to study the effects of trade agreements, integration and globalization,” he says. “Essentially, the same frameworks can still be used, but the trade costs are changing in the opposite direction. Instead of decreasing, they are increasing. At the same time, the modeling of economic sanctions requires new tools, both theoretical and empirical.”
Interest in studying and analyzing sanctions is increasing as well. More than 9,000 users from nearly 3,000 organizations in 134 countries have registered for the GSDB since its launch — not only academic researchers, but also staff at 55 central banks and many international organizations such as the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO and the OECD. The GSDB is also a flagship project of the Center for Global Policy Analysis, which hosts an annual workshop on sanctions, a working-papers series and workshops and seminars by the Philly Trade Group, a group of international trade economists from the greater Philadelphia region.
The GSDB’s impact in academic publications has been wide-ranging: since the original paper was published in the European Economic Review in 2020, the GSDB has received more than 1,400 Google Scholar citations, and a 2023 follow-up with T. Clifton Morgan of Rice University, “Economic Sanctions: Evolution, Consequences, and Challenges,” published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, has become a benchmark reference in the economic literature on sanctions. In 2025, the team was also invited to survey the field in the Annual Review of Economics, in “Economic Sanctions: Stylized Facts and Quantitative Evidence.”
Additionally, Yotov, Syropoulos and their co-authors received the 2025 Harry G. Johnson Prize, the Canadian Economics Association’s award for the best paper published in the Canadian Journal of Economics, for “On the Heterogeneous Effects of Sanctions on Trade.”
Sanctions are also receiving more attention outside of academia, with publications such as the New York Times, Financial Times and Bloomberg News citing the GSDB in recent years. The New York Times has written that the GSDB “has become the most comprehensive tally of its kind.”
The GSDB has also attracted interest from researchers outside of economics for interdisciplinary research, particularly in the fields of political science, international relations and public health. In a 2025 study in The Lancet Global Health, “The Impact of Aid Sanctions on Maternal and Child Mortality, 1990–2019: A Panel Analysis,” Yotov, Syropoulos, Kirilakha and Professor of Economics Sebastien Bradley, PhD, joined colleagues at Stanford University to show that aid sanctions — cuts in foreign aid imposed as a penalty — raise infant, under-5 and maternal mortality rates in the targeted countries by 3.1%, 3.6% and 6.4%, respectively. Sanctions lasting five years would negate nearly 30% of a country’s progress in reducing infant and under-5 deaths, and about 60% of its progress in reducing maternal deaths.
Findings like these speak to the growing reach of sanctions across borders and their impact on society at large.
“Consumers are affected by sanctions through energy costs, through intermediates and through finished goods,” Yotov says. “Sometimes sanctions are used for political purposes, and sometimes for economic ones, but I think they do affect many aspects of our lives.”
The team’s next sanctions workshop, in Konstanz, Germany, in June 2027, will also bring in sanctions practitioners, such as lawyers and policymakers. The Global Sanctions Data Base is freely available to researchers and policy institutions via globalsanctionsdatabase.com.
