Sanctions Effectiveness, Development and Regime Type. Are Aid Suspensions and Economic Sanctions Alike?
Working Paper Series no. 1042. The efficacy of international sanctions in bringing about compliance with the goals of the sender is of interest to both International Relations (IR) and development scholars. Yet, aid suspensions receive less attention in sanctions research than economic sanctions, which may be biasing our understanding of sanctions efficacy. Since recent research has established that different autocratic types display diverging degrees of resilience to sanctions, we ascertain whether such claims are applicable to aid suspensions. First, we look at how resilient different regime types are to sanctions and then investigate whether results for aid suspensions differ from those for sanctions in general. After that, we hypothesise that wealth protects autocracies less from aid suspensions than from other sanctions because their effects are harder to evade. With the help of econometric analysis, we test our hypotheses on original data that feature aid suspensions as a stand-alone category. Test results corroborate the superior resistance of single-party regimes and monarchies. A final test on the role of target prosperity uncovers a nuance: affluence strengthens target resistance to economic sanctions but not to aid suspensions. This confirms our evasion hypothesis: while alternative trade routes can offset a ban on trade with a set of senders, substitute donors are rare.
Table: Sanctions effectiveness by regime type according to Geddes et al. (2014), controlled by GDP (in PPP)
Non-Technical Summary
Sanctions scholarship has posited that certain types of autocracies are more vulnerable to economic sanctions than others. However, it has not investigated if the same is true of aid suspensions. The scarce attention paid to aid sanctions, despite their ubiquity in the geopolitical landscape, may be biasing our understanding of sanctions’ efficacy. Sanctions targets and recipients of official development aid (ODA) are concentrated in the Global South, while the Global North dominates the group of aid donors and sanctions senders.
The present paper explores whether economic sanctions and aid suspensions behave similarly when applied to different autocratic types. To do so, we develop a purpose-made sanctions database that features aid suspensions, a recurrent omission in conventional sanctions databases. Our data comprises a total of 309 episodes, each of which is defined as a set of restrictions imposed by a sender against a target for the same violation, spanning the timeframe from 1990 to 2018.
We formulate and test three hypotheses. First, we aim to establish which autocratic types are most vulnerable to sanctions, taking both economic and aid sanctions into account. We classify autocracies into military, personalist and single-party regimes, according to the classification by autocracy expert Barbara Geddes. Scholarship ascribes the stability of autocratic regimes to their level of institutionalisation, positing that less institutionalised regimes are more reliant on narrow support groups and repression to maintain power. According to this logic, monarchies and single-party regimes should be more resilient than personalist and military regimes. Second, we examine whether these results change when only aid sanctions are considered, in order to ascertain whether they behave similarly or differently. In a final step, we inquire whether variation in the level of prosperity of the target is a better predictor of sanctions success than autocratic type.
Our findings corroborate the resistance of single-party regimes to sanctions pressure. Results using the Geddesian classification confirm institutional solidity as the determinant of regime stability under challenging economic conditions: the least institutionalised types like personalist regimes face difficulties weathering the impact of sanctions. Our tests reveal that not only are democracies more vulnerable to sanctions pressure than non-democracies, but such vulnerability increases with the level of freedom in the target. The closer a regime moves up the democracy scale, the more vulnerable it becomes to sanctions pressure, irrespective of its type.
Our second hypothesis is validated, corroborating that aid suspensions display similar effects on autocratic types as economic sanctions and highlighting that the marginal role ascribed to them in mainstream sanctions scholarship is unwarranted. Lastly, the test of our third hypothesis reveals an intriguing circumstance: Wealth exerts a shielding effect against sanctions in general, but this effect disappears when only aid sanctions are considered. This finding confirms that aid sanctions cannot be compensated by evasion as economic sanctions can. A target country’s resistance to sanctions can be explained by its continued ability to generate revenue by resorting to alternative trading partners and illicit routes. By contrast, a target’s affluence is not a predictor of resilience for those affected by aid suspensions because substitutes for withdrawing donors are in short supply.
Keywords: Foreign Aid, Economic Sanctions, Regime Types, Sanctions Evasion
Codes JEL : F51, O19, F53, Z18, O55, F13
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Updated on the 23rd of April 2026