This paper is the first part of a larger work in progress, titled “U.S. Travel Restrictions to Cuba: Overview, Implications, and Challenges,” that will provide an in-depth and comprehensive look of U.S. travel restrictions to Cuba. This paper provides the backdrop for the travel restrictions, a chronology of their evolution, and an overview of current […]

Notes1 Almost since the beginning of the revolution in 1959, the Cuban leadership and some foreign scholars have blamed mother nature for the failures or inefficiencies of the agricultural sector.2 I could easily fill many pages with quotes from Cuban officials, especially from President Castro, that illustrate my point. I think that the quotes in […]

Over the last two decades, a range of socialist and post-communist countries have become successfully integrated into the international financial system. This has occurred as the globalization of the world economy has increased the relevance of the international financial institutions (IFIs) as key arbiters of economic policy, the guardians of macroeconomic stability, and the leading […]

Notes1 This article is written as a result of a trip that the author made to Cuba in March 2003. Some of the non-economic aspects of the trip are brought out in an article that has been published elsewhere.2 The economic topics that follow are those that arose in conversations with people from Cuba, or […]

In our analysis, we compare several methods for estimating the unrealized U.S.-Cuban trade potential in the context of the gravity trade model. We are the first to focus on the Hausman-Taylor method for out-of-sample trade projections, and find that this seldom-used method to be the superior choice. The Hausman-Taylor method eliminates the heterogeneity bias that […]