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The use of economic sanctions has grown dramatically in recent decades. Nevertheless, many arguments are presented in the public policy space regarding their effects on target populations. The author presents the first systematic analysis of the effects of sanctions on living conditions in target countries.

This paper provides a comprehensive survey and assessment of the literature on the effects of economic sanctions on living standards in target countries. The author identifies 31 studies that apply quantitative econometric or calibration methods to cross-country and national data to assess the impact of economic sanctions on indicators of human and economic development. The author provides in-depth discussions of three sanctions episodes—Iran, Afghanistan and Venezuela—that illustrate the channels through which sanctions affect living conditions in target countries.

Of the 31 studies, 30 find that sanctions have negative effects on outcomes ranging from per capita income to poverty, inequality, mortality and human rights. The author provides new results showing that 54 countries—27% of all countries and 29% of the world economy— are sanctioned today, up from only 4% of countries in the 1960s. In the three cases discussed, sanctions that restricted the access of governments to foreign exchange limited the ability of states to provide essential public goods and services and generated substantial negative spillovers on private sector and nongovernmental actors.

This is the first literature survey that systematically assesses the quantitative evidence on the effect of sanctions on living conditions in target countries.

This study investigates the impact of global economic sanctions on foreign direct investment (FDI).

Data were gathered from several sources, including the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the Global Sanction and the World Bank database, to build a dataset that consists of 172 countries during the period 2003–2019. The panel ordinary least square with a fixed-effects estimator was exploited to achieve the research objective.

The research findings reveal that sanction exerts a detrimental effect on the total inflows of FDI and its components. Regarding different types of sanctions, while military and trade sanctions have little or even no impact on greenfield investment, they have more adverse and sizable effects on cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As). The authors further show that sanctions exert devastating influences through the infrastructure and economic development channels.

Overall, this study implies that a closer look at particular types of FDI is required when implementing policies as different types of FDI may be affected differently by changes in the economy, such as economic sanctions.

This paper is the first empirical study that critically investigates the impact of sanctions on the total inward FDI flows and its two components: greenfield investment and cross-border M&As. It then explores how the sanction–FDI nexus varies depending on several country-level economic factors to understand better how sanctions and different types of sanctions are related to international trade and relations.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the effect of the issuance, adoption and use of digital currencies on economic sanctions with the focus being on the increasing risk of sanction evasion. The research sought to answer three key questions: What is the effect of digital currencies on economic sanctions? To what extent does the adoption and use of digital currencies increase the risk of sanction evasion? What remedial measures can be taken to enforce compliance with sanctions in the wake of increased adoption and use of digital currencies?

The research relied on secondary sources of data, using secondary research to collect archival data in the form of documents. Content and thematic analyses were used to synthesise the collected data.

It was found that digital currencies have significantly increased the risk of sanction evasion. This is because they facilitate the anonymous or pseudonymous conduct of international commercial transactions, which are hard or impossible to detect and track.

This research is the first to explore the different ways in which digital currencies as whole – and not just cryptocurrencies – affect compliance with economic sanctions.

The purpose of this study is to investigate factors contributing to the development of resilience capacity and capability of industrial clusters in order for them to mitigate, absorb and adapt to the impacts of Iran’s economic sanctions.

The Hospital Equipment Cluster of Tehran (HECT) was selected as the case study for the research. The data were collected using the library and field research and analyzed using the thematic analysis method.

The key dimensions of resilience were grouped into socio-cultural, economic, technical-organizational and institutional–infrastructural categories. Based on the “complex adaptive system” theory, each of the abovementioned dimensions were investigated on different levels of analysis, including individual, enterprise, cluster, government and environment. Eventually, recommendations were made by considering required capacities and capabilities of resilience of the hospital equipment sector toward economic sanctions.

The resilience toward economic sanctions, as an extensive disaster, is a considerably new subject and few studies have been performed in the field. This research provides practical solutions for local policy-makers, authorities and enterprise managers.

US sanctions have been a major feature of US Iran policy since Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution, but the imposition of UN and worldwide bilateral sanctions on Iran that began in 2006 and increased dramatically as of 2010 is recent by comparison. The objectives of US sanctions have evolved over time. Broad international sanctions imposed on Iran harmed Iran’s economy and contributed to Iran’s acceptance of agreements that exchange constraints on its nuclear program for sanctions relief. The subject of this study is important because both Iran and the international communities are demanding for information about the effect of sanctions on Iran. In an international and regional perspective, it seems that sanctions have a negative impact on economic, social and even political status of Iran. Therefore, this paper aims to examine the impact of Iran Central Bank sanction on Tehran Stock Exchange as on December 31, 2011.

Variables of model are consisted by exchange rate, oil prices and Tehran Stock Exchange Price Index (TEPIX) from October 2, 2011 to March 29, 2012, which is offered daily. To analyze the model, the authors used Johansen–Juselius and Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) methods.

The results indicate that there is a long-run equilibrium relationship between selected variables as oil prices, and exchange rates have a positive effect on the TEPIX. In other words, the results of the econometric estimation show the positive effect of the Iran Central Bank sanction on the TEPIX. Thus, because of economic sanctions imposed by the Western countries, Tehran Stock Exchange has been growing.

No empirical research exists that examines the impact of sanctions on stock price in developing countries. This study fills this gap by examining the links between sanctions and stock price in Iran.

The blockchain technology is based on distributed ledger. Many stakeholders, such as developers, entrepreneurs and technology lovers, consider the blockchain as an economic and business re-creation that is faced with numerous challenges in its application. Blockchain technology is the backbone of many digital currencies, i.e. Bitcoin and Ethereum. Although presently digital currencies are recognized as payment and exchange instruments in many countries, the economic sanctions imposed on some countries have restricted the possibility of the trading. So, this study seeks to evaluate the adoption of blockchain for digital currency use in Iran in the shadow of economic sanctions.

The developed value-based technology adoption model and smart PLS software have been used in this research. The statistical population of the study was people active in the Iranian stock market; the purpose for this selection was their familiarity with financial and digital currency issues.

The results show that the terms of sanctions, usage and facilitating conditions are directly related to users' perceived value of digital currency and its use; As a result, in a sanctioned country like Iran, the use of digital currencies is being accepted as a way of rolling out economic sanctions and thus making commercial payments.

As well as the fact that evaluating the adoption of the blockchain technology in a sanctioned country like Iran is considered as the originality aspect of the research, applying an extended model in the technology adoption is also the research innovation.

When terrorism threaten geopolitical stability, many policymakers turn to economic sanctions. In this way, governments and multilateral organizations continue to affect corporate and managerial choices, through the shaping and constraining of international trade policies. Still, most of the international business remain relatively quiet about the impact of the non-market environment on firms’ strategic efforts. Questions remain about how firms adjust their strategies in the face of the often-sudden impact of changes in multilateral rules and enforcement mechanisms. This study aims to address this question by shedding light on three potential adjustment strategies for firms that have been impacted by sanctions.

As part of a larger, multimethod study, the authors undertook 16 semi-structured interviews with senior managers of firms whose operations have been affected by international sanctions.

International and political tensions can affect businesses in many ways, from exporting to strategies associated with global knowledge sourcing. Learnings from organizations that have had to respond to sudden and extreme changes in their fragile ecosystems will aid this study. In this commentary paper, the authors offer suggestions about how to adapt, respond and operate in a new reality.

While the imposition of long-term political sanctions, especially by powerful nations and multilateral institutions, has become more frequent, how businesses cope with these extreme external shifts still remains unknown. This paper focuses on firms operating in a sanctioned regime, investigating how they deal with these sudden changes in their environment.

The purpose of the current paper is to analyze the simultaneous effects of oil sanctions and financial sanctions on Iran's macroeconomic variables in a small open economy in the dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) framework.

A DSGE model with the new Keynesian approach has been designed for the above mentioned purpose giving consideration to households, production, trade, oil, government and central bank sectors. All of the parameters were calibrated by using geometric means of macroeconomic variables in 2004–2017 as the steady-state values of the variables in the static model.

Amplifying the intensity of the oil sanctions reduces oil production due to decreasing investment, technology and export of oil and reduces the central bank's foreign reserves ratio to the money base that leads to an increasing exchange rate. Furthermore, oil sanctions decrease the government revenues due to a decrease in oil export and by the government imposing an expansionary fiscal policy in the form of increasing current expenditure and preserving construction expenditure to prevent deepening the recession, which causes budget deficit and then the issue of more bonds with a higher nominal interest rate. On the other hand, financial sanctions raise transaction costs and marginal costs in the trade sectors that lead to inflation and a decrease in nonoil export and various kinds of imports. Due to inflation and uncertainty, consumption of a household increases and investment expenditure of a household decreases.

To the best of the author's knowledge, few studies in the world have analyzed the economic effect of the sanctions in the framework of DSGE models. There is no study in Iran to date which investigates the effects of the sanctions in the form of a DSGE model. So, this paper is the first study in Iran and one of the few studies in the world using a DSGE model for analyzing the effects of sanctions. Imposing three kinds of oil sanctions in addition to a financial sanction is another innovation of the current paper.

This paper aims to investigate the difference between the impacts of indicators of trade barriers (TBs) on bankrupt enterprises (BEs), new enterprises (NEs) and other enterprises (OEs).

The paper has used a multiple-step approach. At the first stage, the initial data has been collected from interviews with 164 top managers of SMEs in West Azerbaijan in Iran during two periods of 2013–2015 and 2017–2019. At the second step, multiple correspondence analysis has been used to summarize the relationships between variables and construct indices for different groups of TBs. Finally, the generalized structural equation model method was used to examine the impact of export barriers.

The results showed that the political legal index is the main TBs for BEs and NEs, but it had a more significant impact on BEs; the financial index was the second major TBs factor for BEs, while OEs did not have a problem in performance index, and the financial index was classified as a minor obstacle for them. All indicators of marketing barriers (except production index) had a negative and significant effect on all enterprises; the most important TBs for NEs was the information index.

The results indicated that if enterprises have a strong financial system and function, they can lessen the impact of sanctions and keep themselves in the market.

With the rise of geopolitical tensions among the leading state actors, the Chinese citizens and companies are increasingly targeted by the unilateral restrictive measures. These frequently include the so-called secondary sanctions, i.e. penalties imposed on third parties for failing to comply with the sanctions regime, the US practice being a prominent example. The purpose of this paper is to analyze China's legal instruments related to imposition of and protection from unilateral restrictive measures of third countries.

The present paper discusses China’s legal defenses counteracting the extraterritorial sanctions by comparison with the legislative and enforcement practices of the EU, which has accumulated substantial experience trying to shield its businesses from the US secondary sanctions. The paper identifies the differences between the two anti-sanctions regimes and highlights the key factors that will affect the future enforcement of blocking rules in China.

When designing its anti-foreign sanctions legislation, China has considered similar legislation adopted by other jurisdictions, most notably – the EU blocking statute. The comparative assessment of the two blocking regimes reveals substantial similarities in legislative and procedural standards with important differences in enforcement capabilities and institutional frameworks.

The paper represents one of the first attempts to anticipate the directions in enforcement of China's blocking legislation taking into account the EU experiences in this domain.