Sanctions and the Geography of Recorded Iranian Crude Oil Trade from 2010 to 2020

A rising destination share can conceal a falling level of trade. We examine this relationship for Iranian crude oil (HS 2709) during 2010–2020 using importer-side UN Comtrade records for 24 destinations, an independent Turkish regulatory series, and national statistics that help classify absent records. The 109 positive destination-year records are compared in value, destination share, concentration within fixed sets of buyers, net weight, and implied unit value; the 155 absent cells are documented and retained as missing in the principal analysis. Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood models with destination and year fixed effects interact European destinations with policy periods over 2010–2019, with 2020 treated descriptively. Recorded value fell from USD 74.40 billion in 2011 to USD 13.86 billion in 2019. China’s share rose from 29.3% to 51.1% while its import value fell from USD 21.82 billion to USD 7.08 billion; among four continuously observed Asian buyers, two-thirds of the logarithmic decline in value reflects lower weight rather than lower unit values. The European-to-other-destination ratio was 96% lower in 2013–2015 than in 2010–2011, with consistent evidence across jackknife and wild cluster bootstrap inference and analyses omitting each destination and year in turn. The estimates describe observed positive flows and do not identify causal sanctions effects or show that redirection compensated for lost exports.