Notes1 Economic outcomes have differed widely across the countries that have transitioned away from centrally planned economies. Since 1989, the centrally planned economies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have moved to dismantle centralized control and allow market mechanisms to allocate resources to differing degrees and at different paces. This paper looks back […]

Notes1 Social security is at the center of the economic debate in most of the world. The intense population aging occurring in many advanced countries of Europe and Asia is causing social security finances to be under severe pressure, threatening fiscal sustainability. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the presence of relative young populations has […]

Notes1 Analysts of pre-revolutionary Cuba’s economy wondered why the potential for the development of a vibrant national fishing industry had not received proper attention. This started to change in the 1950s as the country’s newly established development banks began to allocate resources to promote the fishing industry’s growth (Alvarez Díaz 1963:1032– 1038). Further impetus was […]

Parallel to the increase of the size of the Cuban Diaspora in the United States, as described by Guillermo Martínez, there was also an accelerated creation and development of Cuban-owned businesses in the United States. Internal and external factors associated with this Diaspora first made possible and later facilitated the creation of enterprises. Internal factors […]

I have been invited by the organizers of the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy to participate in a roundtable to discuss the impact of social media in contemporary Cuba. In particular, I was asked to comment on two specific issues: (1) whether the explosion of social media […]