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Economic Sanctions and Government Spending Adjustments: The Case of Disaster Preparedness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2019

Elena V McLean Open the ORCID record for Elena V McLean [Opens in a new window]  and
Taehee Whang Open the ORCID record for Taehee Whang [Opens in a new window]
Elena V McLean*
Affiliation:
University at Buffalo, SUNY
Taehee Whang
Affiliation:
Yonsei University, Seoul
*
*Corresponding author. Email: elenamcl@buffalo.edu
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Abstract

Economic sanctions research suggests that sanctioned countries’ overall economic costs tend to be low. This article argues that, despite this, sanction costs can force the governments of these countries to reallocate budget resources from low-priority spending categories to other categories in an effort to minimize their political costs. One such low-priority category is disaster preparedness and mitigation. The authors show that economic sanctions lead to reduced disaster preparedness spending and, as a result, increase the scale of economic and human losses generated by natural disasters in sanctioned countries.

Keywords

economic sanctionssanction costsgovernment spendingdisaster preparedness
Type
Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 51 , Issue 1 , January 2021 , pp. 394 - 411
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

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https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/YZSZFY
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