Quantifying the impact of economic sanctions on international trade in the energy and mining sectors

We study the impact of economic sanctions on international trade in the mining sector. We demonstrate that the gravity equation is well‐suited to model bilateral trade costs in mining and find that sanctions have been effective in impeding mining trade. Complete trade sanctions have reduced mining trade by about 44% on average. We also document significant heterogeneity in the sanctions effects on mining trade across industries, sanction episodes/cases, depending on the sanctioning and sanctioned countries, the type of sanctions, and the direction of trade. We take a close look at the impact of recent sanctions on Iran and Russia.