Identifying the effect of the US embargo on the Cuban economy: A comment on Bastos, Geloso, and Bologna Pavlik (2026)

Francisco Rodriguez

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Bastos, Geloso, and Bologna Pavlik (2026) argue that the US embargo explains less than one-tenth of the difference in per capita income between Cuba and a counterfactual scenario in which the country did not follow socialist economic policies. We show that their results are driven by the use of an elasticity of income to trade openness that is neither representative nor a reasonable upper bound of the values found in the literature and by their choice to attribute the effect of the interaction between the embargo and other determinants of growth solely to those other determinants. We show that, once these problems are corrected, the embargo can account for a substantial fraction, and in some cases all, of Cuba’s post-1959 economic underperformance.

Keywords: Cuba; Economic Sanctions; International Trade; Economic Growth; Socialism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F13 F14 O11 O24 O47 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-04-20
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:128796

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