The Theory of International Economic Sanctions--A Public Choice Approach: Comment

William Kaempfer and Anton Lowenberg (in this Review, September 1988) have developed an engaging model of the sanctions process grounded in public choice. They identify potentially influential private forces that might affect the nature of a sanctions package. While the spirit of their effort is laudable, the model fails to incorporate some absolutely essential information about the legal, institutional, and strategic framework in which sanctions decisions are made. As a consequence they reach a conclusion that flies in the face of existing facts. Contrary to what is suggested by Kaempfer and Lowenberg (KL), and contrary to the implications of their model, the evidence clearly indicates there is an unequivocal bias against the use of import restrictions in favor of export controls. The recent history of economic sanctions shows that only somewhat more than one-third of sanction episodes involved both export and import controls. ' Further, Gary Hufbauer and Jeffrey Schott (1985) observe that, "in instances where only one or the other is invoked, export controls are almost always preferred to restrictions on imports. "2 An almost exclusive reliance on export controls in economic foreign policy measures is particularly evident in the actions of the United States in the 1970s.3 The purpose of this comment is to explore the causes of this asymmetry. There are at least three reasons why export controls have been favored over import controls, reasons that play no part in the KL model. First, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) has institutionalized a bias against import barriers in favor of export controls. Second, in the United States domestic legal constraints favor export controls and discourage import controls. Third, as will be argued, export controls are more easily reversed than import controls and reversibility is a desirable component in any foreign-policy based trade intervention. Consider these points in turn. In the 1946-1948 period, during which time the GATT was first negotiated, "trade barriers" were identified most often with those artificial impediments to trade that restrict foreign access to domestic markets, especially tariffs. For this reason, GATT rules and actions have sought primarily to dismantle import barriers. John Jackson (1969, p. 502) notes that "despite the fact that extensive export controls do exist, there has been only one complaint with respect to such controls reflected in GATT documents. This is the Czechoslovakian complaint against the United States. " in 1949 for the imposition of discriminatory export controls.4 Jackson (p. 502) observes that there is ". very little, if any, effective GATT policing of export control policy. " And he comments later (p. 539) that "insofar as any GATT obligations can be avoided without consequences, this avoidance operates in effect as an exception. " This suggests that those foreign policy export controls that are pro*Department of Economics, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721. I thank Alan Deardorff, Bernard Hoekman, and Robert Stem for helpful discussions on work related to this note. My thanks also to two anonymous referees for their constructive comments. 'See p. 28 and Tables 4.1-4.5, pp. 70-77, Hufbauer and Schott (1985). 2Ibid. , p. 28. 3See, for example, Richard Cooper (1987), pp. 301-302 and p. 305, and Kenneth Abbott (1981), p. 741. 4This is confirmed more recently by Barry Carter (1988, p. 97). The only other event involving export restrictions challenged before the GATT was the U.S. embargo against Nicaragua in 1985 which involved both import and export restrictions.