Sanctions and Imports of Essential Goods: A Closer Look at the Equipo Anova (2021) Results
Journal: arXiv (Cornell University)
Year: 2022

We revisit the results of a recent paper by Equipo Anova, who claim to find evidence of an improvement in Venezuelan imports of food and medicines associated with the adoption of U.S. financial sanctions towards Venezuela in 2017. We show that their results are consequence of data coding errors and questionable methodological choices, including the use an unreasonable functional form that implies a counterfactual of negative imports in the absence of sanctions, the omission of data accounting fo