Jales paper on the role of the 1959 Revolution on Cuba's economic performance published in The WE
Jan 17, 2018
Measuring the Role of the 1959 Revolution on Cuba's Economic Performance
Hugo Jales, Thomas H. Kang, Guilherme Stein & Felipe Garcia Ribeiro
The World Economy, January 2018
This paper quantitatively measures the impact of the 1959 Cuban revolution on the country’s GDP per capita and exports. The authors use various policy evaluation methods to obtain a valid counterfactual of Cuba’s GDP per capita after the revolution using other Latin American countries as control candidates. They find evidence that, regarding both outcomes, the overall impact of the revolution was negative. They also document a negative effect of the economic embargo imposed by the United States and a sizable, positive effect of Cuba’s trade agreement with the Soviet Union.