Master Thesis Delia Hausheer

Objective and Introduction: This scoping review aims to illustrate the impact economic sanctions have on children's health and to asses which countries, topics, time periods and recommendations are more present in the available literature. There are some scoping and systematic reviews analyzing the impact economic sanctions have on health in general in sanctioned countries, but there are only very few scoping or systematic reviews focusing exclusively on children's health and none of them focus on all aspects of children's health.

Methods: Three databases (PubMed, JSTOR, Google Scholar) and three digital libraries (UN Digital Library, WHO Library, UNICEF) were searched. Additional articles were identified from the list of references. The search was conducted from November 2023 to February 2024. All types of journal articles and reports of organizations, such as the UN or WHO, analyzing the impact of economic sanctions with a primary focus on children's mental and physical health were included. Newsletters and websites, as well as articles that were not written in English or German, were excluded. After excluding duplicates, viewing abstracts and reading full texts, 32 articles were included in this scoping review.

Results: Almost half of the included articles were original articles or review articles. A majority of the articles focused on Iraq, followed by articles using information from multiple countries. Only a few articles discussed the impact of economic sanctions in Haiti, Iran, Cuba and Serbia. More than half of the articles included found that economic sanctions had an impact on children's health. The impacts found can be divided into four broad categories: (1) increase in child mortality, (2) increase in child malnutrition, (3) increase in the prevalence of infectious diseases among children and (4) drug shortages. This scoping review also found that well over half of the first authors were located in the US and UK. Measures recommended to lessen the impact economic sanctions have on children range from changes in legislation over humanitarian aid to research.

Conclusions: This scoping review has shown that most of the included articles found a negative impact of economic sanctions on children's health regarding mortality, malnutrition, prevalence of infectious diseases and availability of drugs. The main focus of the literature, published up until now and analyzing the impact of economic sanctions on children's health, lies in Iraq. Only a few articles focus on Cuba, Iran, Haiti or Serbia. Some of the measures recommended in the articles can still be applied today due to certain issues persisting and difficulties in implementing sanction regulation arising in practice (1). As this is a scoping review, the significance of these articles can't be assessed. Nonetheless, this scoping review shows that there seems to be a consensus among researchers that economic sanctions have a negative impact on children's health. There is, however, an ongoing debate on how big the impact on children's health and mortality truly is.