Sanctions and Imports of Essential Goods: A Closer Look at the Equipo Anova (2021) Results

We revisit the results of Equipo Anova (2021), 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 for four-fifths of the country’s food imports at the time of sanctions and incorrect application of regression discontinuity methods. Once these errors are corrected, the evidence of a significant improvement in the level and rate of change in imports of essentials disappears.