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The Cuban Revolution and Infant Mortality: A Synthetic Control Approach

Name: The Cuban Revolution and Infant Mortality: A Synthetic Control Approach
Published: 2020-09-15
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

Principal Investigator(s): View help for Principal Investigator(s) Vincent Geloso, King's University College; Jamie Bologna Pavlik, Texas Tech University

Version: View help for Version V3

Name	File Type	Size	Last Modified
Data			09/15/2020 02:13:PM
Do-files--1945-1980-period--Latin-America-donor-pool			09/23/2020 09:02:AM
Do-files--1945-1980-period--Rich-Countries-Donor-Pool			09/23/2020 08:54:AM
Do-files--1975-2005-period--Latin-American-Donor-pool			09/23/2020 08:58:AM
Do-files--1975-2005-period--Rich-Countries-Donor-pool			09/23/2020 09:05:AM
Intermediate-data-in-excel-form			09/15/2020 02:48:PM
Readme Castro Cuba.docx	application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document	20.5 KB	09/23/2020 05:05:AM

Project Citation:

Geloso, Vincent, and Bologna Pavlik, Jamie. The Cuban Revolution and Infant Mortality: A Synthetic Control Approach. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2020-09-23. https://doi.org/10.3886/E121691V3

Project Description

Summary: The Cuban government often boasts that the country's infant mortality rate has been low and falling since Fidel Castro's revolution in 1959. However, because many Latin American countries have experienced similar decreases, and because Cuba historically enjoyed lower infant mortality rates than the rest of Latin America, it is unclear whether the government should get credit. We use the fact that Cuba underwent momentous and unique political changes to consider the effect of Castro’s regime on infant mortality. We employ a synthetic control method to ascertain how much of the reduction, if any, can be attributed to the regime. We find that in the first decade of the regime, infant mortality increased relative to the counterfactual, but that---after the introduction of Soviet subsidies---infant mortality partially reverted to trend. To measure the effect of the subsidies, we run a second synthetic control test concerning the collapse of the Soviet Union and the accompanying end of the subsidies. This control suggests that the subsidies played no important role.

Funding Sources: No funding received

Scope of Project

Geographic Coverage: Cuba

Time Period(s): 1945 – 2005

Collection Date(s): 1945 – 2005

Data Type(s): aggregate data

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