will the sanctions against Russia work

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“If your economy is not functioning it is difficult to wage war,” says Peter van Bergeijk, professor of international economics and macroeconomics at Rotterdam’s Erasmus University and editor of the 2021 book Research Handbook on Economic Sanctions. “That is the basic mechanism of across-the-board sanctions.”

“There is a difference of opinion about what [sanctions strategy] works best,” says van Bergeijk. “There is one school that says you have to start small and increase the pressure all the time, because it makes every next step more credible and you need to be able to escalate. 

“The other school says that if you don’t do the big stuff straight away then the economy will have time to make preparations. I tend to be in the second school – the sanctions in 2014 didn’t work and they gave Russia time to prepare.

“I think the sanctions so far are relatively weak, compared with what could be done. There is a lot of restraint. The energy sector isn’t quite business as usual, but it is still continuing on a large scale.”

“The reason Saddam Hussein didn’t give in to sanctions in the 1990s was that it would have meant the end of his reign and probably of his life,” says van Bergeijk. “I think that is how dictators evaluate what is happening to the economy: what is the cost of giving in?”

 

Period9 Mar 2022

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