Economic Sanctions and Bilateral Trade:
A Literature Review

ABSTRACT
The economic sanctions are multilevel phenomena that not only affects both sides of the action but also have implications for third parties, reshaping the political and economic relations of the sender and target countries with the other states. The primary focus of this literature review is to summarize the main ideas related to the concepts of economic sanctions and bilateral trade.While most of the studies focus on the sender country, its goals, its success or failure, rather less attention has been paid to the responses of the target country or the after sanctions period of the target states.Most studies have not explained whether a target country chooses to diversify its trade relations to ease up the pressure of the economic sanctions that are imposed by a sender country that has a large trade share in the target country.

Keywords: economic sanctions, trade diversification, bilateral trade, smart sanctions, export diversification, trade diversion