New Study Estimates Over Half a Million People Die Each Year Due to Unilateral Economic Sanctions

Findings Published in The Lancet Global Health Conclude that Sanctions Are as Lethal as Military Conflicts

WASHINGTON, July 23, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- A new study published in the British medical journal The Lancet Global Health finds that unilateral economic sanctions lead to about 564,000 excess deaths around the world each year. The findings, by Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) economists Mark Weisbrot and Francisco Rodríguez, and Silvio Rendón, show that this human toll is roughly equivalent to total deaths from wars, including civilian casualties, and is more than the annual number of battle-related casualties.

Most of the sanctions-related deaths in the five decades after 1970 were children under the age of five.

"It is immoral and indefensible that such a lethal form of collective punishment continues to be used, let alone that it has been steadily expanded over the years," study coauthor and CEPR co-director Mark Weisbrot said. "And sanctions are widely misunderstood as being a less lethal, almost nonviolent, policy alternative to military force."

The study analyzes the health impact of economic sanctions using a dataset of age-specific mortality rates and sanctions events for 152 countries from 1971 to 2021. It finds a significant association between sanctions and increased mortality, with the "strongest effects for unilateral, economic, and US sanctions."

The researchers studied sanctions' effects on age-specific mortality rates. They found that children under five made up 51 percent of total deaths due to sanctions over the 1970–2021 period. Most deaths (77 percent over the same period) were aged 0–15 and 60–80.

The study is the first to systematically examine the effects of sanctions on age-specific mortality in cross-country data using methods designed to address causal questions on observational data.

The "results illustrate how the effects of sanctions on mortality generally increase over time, with longer-lived sanctions episodes resulting in higher tolls on lives," the study's authors write.

They also note that US or EU unilateral sanctions may be more lethal than the multilateral sanctions imposed by the United Nations, as "unilateral sanctions imposed by the USA or the EU might be designed in ways that have a greater negative effect on target populations." UN sanctions, however, "have been framed as efforts to minimise their impact on civilian populations, although the extent to which they have achieved this goal remains debated."

Despite their lethality and their failure, in many if not most cases, to lead to "regime change" or other policy objectives (the 60-year-old Cuba embargo being an emblematic example), "the use of economic sanctions has grown substantially in recent decades," with "25% of all countries … subject to some type of sanctions by either the USA, the EU, or the UN in the 2010–22 period, by contrast with an average of only 8% in the 1960s."

"We have seen economic sanctions — especially those imposed by the US — contribute substantially to economic collapse in targeted countries, such as Venezuela," study coauthor Francisco Rodríguez, a senior research fellow at CEPR and a professor at the University of Denver's Josef Korbel School, said. "Sanctions often fail to achieve their stated objectives and instead only punish the civilian populations of the targeted countries. It is well past time that the US, EU, and other powerful actors in the international community seriously reconsider this cruel and often counterproductive mechanism."

SOURCE The Center For Economic and Policy Research