Measuring the role of the 1959 revolution on Cuba's economic performance

Abstract

This paper quantitatively measures the impact of the 1959 Cuban revolution on the country's GDP per capita and exports. We 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. We find evidence that regarding both outcomes, the overall impact of the revolution was negative. We 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.

Synthetic Control Method: Inference, Sensitivity Analysis and Confidence Sets

“…Moreover, we note that the permutation test's p-value increases fast as a function of the sensitivity parameter ϕ ∈ ℝ + as subfigure 2(a) shows. 29 We, now, estimate two one-sided 12 /14-Confidence Sets. 30 While subfigure 3(a) considers a Constant in Time Intervention Effect following equation (16), subfigure 3(b) considers a Linear in Time Intervention Effect whose intercept is equal to zero following equation (18).…”

Making sense of dictatorships and health outcomes

“…34 Today, it is one of the poorest countries on the continent even if it is more equal. 35 Jales et al 36 used novel methods in causal inference econometrics to assess how rich Cuba would have been absent the revolution. They find that the country would be more than 30% richer than it is now.…”

What has New Zealand gained from The FTA with China?: Two counterfactual analyses†

“…Since its introduction, the SCM has seen a range of applications in economics, political science, and international relations. 10 In the words of Athey and Imbens 10 Examples of such applications include openness and trade liberalization policies (Nannicini and Billmeier, 2011;Billmeier and Nannicini, 2013;Ritzel and Kohler, 2017), impact of trade agreements (Hosny, 2012;Hannan, 2016Hannan, , 2017Aytuğ et al, 2017), impact of joining a currency union (Saia, 2017;Puzzello and Gomis-Porqueras, 2018), economic regimes/political stability (Matta et al, 2019;Jales et al, 2018;Grier and Maynard, 2016;Meyersson, 2017), natural disasters (Coffman and Noy, 2012;Cavallo et al, 2013;Mideksa, 2013;Barone and Mocetti, 2014;Mohan, 2017), terrorism, civil wars, crime, and political risks (Montalvo, 2011;Pinotti, 2015;Singhal and Nilakantan, 2016;Bilgel and Karahasan, 2017;Bove et al, 2017;Costalli et al, 2017;Bove and Elia, 2018), health economics (Bilgel and Galle, 2015;Kreif et al, 2016), economic sanctions (Gharehgozli, 2017), migration (Powell et al, 2017), and natural resource discoveries (Smith, 2015). (2017, p. 9), the synthetic control approach is "arguably the most important innovation in the policy evaluation literature in the last 15 years.…”