In a globalized world, it is increasingly common for states to use coercive measures to advance their political agendas. One of these tools is sanctions, a form of economic pressure that involves freezing assets or blocking transactions. These are intended to deter a country from violating international law or other norms and may be imposed by the UN Security Council, NATO, the EU, and others.

Global sanctions emerged as a tool of policymaking in the first decade of the twentieth century. They were made possible by a set of preconditions, including the heyday of laissez-faire liberalism and the gold standard in the 1870s and 1880s; the expansion of bureaucratic capacity in the 1910s; and the development of modern mass democracy with universal suffrage in the 1920s.

Today, they remain a crucial part of the diplomatic arsenal in most countries and are applied to a wide range of issues, from human rights violations to countering proliferation. But their use also poses challenges. Sanctions can have unintended side effects, especially when they target the wealthy. As a result, the European Court of Human Rights has raised concerns that targeted sanctions may be in violation of procedural rights enshrined in the European Convention of Human Rights, such as the right to a fair trial (see Nada v. Switzerland, ECHR 2012).

Furthermore, the GSDB allows us to capitalize on developments in empirical trade literature that allow for nesting structural gravity into production models to provide partial estimates of the effects of sanctions. This can enable research on a wider variety of policies that leverage economic coercion, including those targeting labour, environment, and other issues.