00:00 Who does sanctions hurt, really?
00:03 They're meant to end wars, weaken warmongers,
00:08 prevent nuclear weapons manufacturing
00:11 and transform dictatorships into democracies.
00:14 Sanctions foster hope.
00:16 Right now, the most sanctioned country in the world is Russia,
00:20 with more than 12,000 active sanctions against individuals and organisations,
00:26 according to statistics from October 2022.
00:29 In second place is Iran, with several thousand sanctions,
00:33 followed by Syria and North Korea.
00:36 Belarus is third, with just over a thousand,
00:39 followed by Venezuela and Myanmar with several hundred.
00:43 But sanctions have almost never achieved the desired political goals.
00:48 One exception is South Africa,
00:51 where sanctions are believed to have helped put an end to apartheid in 1994.
00:56 Sanctions are by no means ineffective,
00:59 but they usually affect the most vulnerable members of society
01:03 in their incomes the hardest.
01:06 As shown by a study from the Munich Institute for Economic Research,
01:11 it examined 67 countries affected by economic sanctions.
01:16 It found that if the United Nations had imposed the sanctions,
01:21 the country's GDP fell by an average of 2% per year.
01:26 If only the US had imposed the sanctions unilaterally, it was 1%.
01:32 Extrapolated over 10 years,
01:36 this means a drop in per capita GDP of up to 25%.
01:41 In Iran, for example,
01:43 it's the young, uneducated rural population who suffered the most.
01:48 In poorer countries, life expectancy fell by up to 1.4 years
01:54 during an average period of UN sanctions.
01:57 Women are more affected than men.
02:00 However, because the study mostly looked at smaller economies,
02:04 the authors say the results can't necessarily predict
02:07 what would happen to a big economy like Russia.
02:10 To make sanctions more targeted and effective,
02:15 it's important to thoroughly investigate who they will end up affecting most.
02:20 (dramatic music)
