Measuring Trade-Disruption Exposure: A Sanctions-Based Index and Its Validation Against Trade

Economic sanctions are a routine instrument of statecraft, yet exposure to trade-restrictive measures is hard to compare across countries and over time. We build a continuous target-year index of trade-disruption exposure from the dyadic trade-sanction records of the Global Sanctions Data Base, Release 5, encoding the direction and stringency of each active restriction and the breadth of the sanctioning coalition, and a trade-weighted version scaling each restriction by the sender's pre-sanction trade share. In a structural gravity model the graded index recovers what a binary indicator hides. A complete ban is associated with a fall in bilateral trade of about two thirds, a partial ban about a tenth, and the binary flag averages them. The continuous index also predicts large reductions in aggregate trade where the binary indicator is only marginal. Applied to national income the association is not identified, which we present as a cautionary limit of aggregate inference.