| Abstract [eng] |
Over the past decades, international economic sanctions have become one of the most frequently used instruments of foreign and security policy, allowing states to restrict the activities of other countries, companies, or individuals without resorting to direct military intervention. Nevertheless, the economic consequences of sanctions affect not only the targeted entities but also the sanctioning states themselves, which incur adjustment costs due to changes in the volume and structure of foreign trade, investment and capital flows, financing conditions, energy and raw material price dynamics, and the costs of ensuring sanctions compliance and enforcement. Academic literature highlights that the majority of empirical research has traditionally focused on sanctioned states, while the economic costs borne by sanctioning countries have been assessed in a fragmented and inconsistent manner. In 2022, following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the tightening of the sanction’s regime imposed by European countries on Russia and Belarus further underscored the importance of systematically evaluating the economic effects such restrictive measures have on the sanctioning economies themselves. The aim of this master’s thesis is to evaluate the impact of international economic sanctions against Russia and Belarus on the economic growth of European states that imposed them, with particular attention to the tightening of sanctions in 2022. The thesis analyzes the impact of sanctions on the reconfiguration of trade flows, investment and foreign direct investment (FDI) dynamics, changes in financing conditions, and energy vulnerability. In the empirical section, panel-data fixed-effects and Difference-in-Differences (DiD) models are applied, using annual data for 2016–2024 for a sample of 60 countries (31 European sanctioning states and a control group of 29 countries). The econometric analysis shows that after the tightening of the sanctions regime in 2022, the real GDP growth rate in European states imposing sanctions on Russia and Belarus decreased in a statistically significant manner – by an average of about 1.47 percentage points (compared to the control group). The study revealed heterogeneity in the impact: the higher a country’s export dependence on the Russian and Belarusian markets prior to the sanctions, the more economic growth slowed – an additional 1 percentage point of dependence is associated with an approximately 0.44 percentage point greater deceleration of real GDP growth during the sanctions period. With respect to energy vulnerability, no significant systematic differences between countries were identified. The results suggest that the tightening of the sanctions regime in 2022 had a negative short-term impact on the economies of European countries imposing sanctions. A higher risk of negative effects was characteristic of countries with greater trade dependence on the Russian and Belarusian markets. |
