On the Implausibility of the Benign Sanctions Hypothesis

RODRIGUEZ, FRANCISCO (2026): On the Implausibility of the Benign Sanctions Hypothesis.

Abstract

Santos, Morales-Arilla and Partipilo Corneilles (2026) claim that in the absence of sanctions Venezuela's rate of contraction would have accelerated by approximately 6 percentage points a year. Their projections imply an implausible 98\% decline in GDP in a non-sanctions scenario. This would have caused Venezuela's per capita GDP in the absence of sanctions to fall to $\$107$, or 40\% that of the poorest country on earth, a level that has never been documented for any economy in world history. Such a contraction would have been by far the largest economic collapse ever documented, similar in magnitude to that which would result from dropping 100 nuclear warheads on the country. The fact that such extreme counterfactuals are needed to support claims of welfare-enhancing sanctions serves to demonstrate their implausibility.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: Sanctions, Economic Statecraft, Economic Growth, Veneuela
• Subjects: F - International Economics > F5 - International Relations, National Security, and International Political Economy > F51 - International Conflicts ; Negotiations ; Sanctions; O - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth > O5 - Economywide Country Studies > O54 - Latin America ; Caribbean

References

Abadie, Alberto, Alexis Diamond, and Jens Hainmueller. 2015. “Comparative Politics and the Synthetic Control Method.” American Journal of Political Science 59 (2): 495–510. https:// doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12116. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ajps.12116.

Bolt, Jutta, and Jan Luiten van Zanden. 2025. “Maddison-style estimates of the evolution of the world economy: A new 2023 update.” Journal of Economic Surveys 39 (2): 631–671. https://doi.org/10.1111/joes.12618. eprint: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf /10. 1111/joes.12618. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/joes.12618.

Cochrane, Hal, and Dennis Mileti. 1986. “The Consequences of Nuclear War: An Economic and Social Perspective.” In The Medical Implications of Nuclear War, edited by Fredric Solomon and Robert Q. Marston. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. https : / / www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK219185/.

Rodríguez, Francisco. 2023. “The human consequences of economic sanctions.” Journal of Economic Studies 51, no. 4 (November): 942–963. issn: 0144-3585. https://doi.org/10.1108/ JES-06-2023-0299. eprint: https://www.emerald.com/jes/article-pdf/51/4/942/9582956/ jes-06-2023-0299.pdf. https://doi.org/10.1108/JES-06-2023-0299.

Rodríguez, Francisco. 2025. The Collapse of Venezuela. Indiana, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. isbn: 9780268209018.

Rodríguez, Francisco. 2026. The Role of Sanctions in Venezuela’s Collapse: A Critical Comment on Santos et al. (2026). Working Paper. SSRN, May. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm? abstract id=6791538.

Rodríguez, Francisco, and Giancarlo Bravo. 2026. Denying harm: error, misrepresentation and the Venezuela sanctions debate. Technical report. Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Santos, Miguel Angel, José Morales-Arilla, and Zinedine Partipilo Cornielles. 2026a. Author responses to comments on the CUP Elements book “From Collective Punishment to Con- straints on Authority: Rethinking the Impact of US Sanctions on Venezuela”. Technical report. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ygkveL9ZqWRpHLHFRBFb5hcCei3 wSs4/view.

Santos, Miguel Angel, José Morales-Arilla, and Zinedine Partipilo Cornielles. 2026b. From Collective Punishment to Constraints on Authority: Rethinking the Impact of US Sanctions on Venezuela. Elements in the Economics of Emerging Markets. Cambridge University Press. isbn: 9781009704281.