Fidel Castro Died Yesterday!

[OrangeFlorian]

I just left you a link to the Heritage index. Very interesting stuff.

 

[OrangeFlorian]

The whole of Cuba is repressed economically, no property rights, no trade freedom, and massive amounts of government spending

 

[aditya10r]

The whole of Cuba is repressed economically, no property rights, no trade freedom, and massive amounts of government spending

In 2015/14 only 40 cars were sold ..............................

 

[OrangeFlorian]

And all of those are 50s era models

 

[OrangeFlorian]

http://www.heritage.org/index/country/cuba
Cuba
Previous: #176 Venezuela

• Next: #178 North Korea

overall score29.8
world rank177

Terms of Use

RULE OF LAW
Property Rights10.0

Freedom From Corruption46.0

LIMITED GOVERNMENT
Government Spending0.0

Fiscal Freedom52.1

REGULATORY EFFICIENCY
Business Freedom20.0

Labor Freedom20.0

Monetary Freedom65.2

OPEN MARKETS
Trade Freedom64.6

Investment Freedom10.0

Financial Freedom10.0

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See how Cuba compares to another country using any of the measures in the Index.

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QUICK FACTS

• Population:
  • 11.2 million
• GDP (PPP):
  • $134.3 billion
  • 1.3% growth
  • $11,950 per capita
• Unemployment:
• Inflation (CPI):
  • 5.3%
• FDI Inflow:

Embed This Data
Cuba’s economy remains repressed by the systemic inefficiency and institutional shortcomings characteristic of a Communist regime. Dominated by state-owned companies connected to the military and political elite, the economy continues to suffer from a lack of dynamism aggravated by cronyism, corruption, and bureaucracy. Non-state sectors have gradually expanded, but the absence of genuine political will for reform leaves business struggling within a poor regulatory framework.

Economic Freedom Snapshot

• 2016 Economic Freedom Score: 29.8 (up 0.2 point)
• Economic Freedom Status: Repressed
• Global Ranking: 177th
• Regional Ranking: 29th in the South and Central America/Caribbean Region
• Notable Successes: None
• Concerns: Rule of Law, Labor Freedom, and Financial Freedom
• Overall Score Change Since 2012: +1.5

Much-touted “free-market reforms” have largely involved only cosmetic changes. The rule of law remains subject to political influence and the overriding interests of the Communist Party. The judiciary’s autonomy is severely impeded by the centralization of power in the one-party state.

BACKGROUND
Fidel Castro’s 84-year-old brother Raúl leads both the government and the Cuban Communist Party. Violent repression of civil society and dissidents has increased dramatically in the past year. Restrictions on foreign travel have been eased, but certain Cubans are still barred from leaving. Cuba depends on external assistance such as remittances from Cuban émigrés and oil subsidies provided by Venezuela for the foreign exchange it needs to survive. With world oil prices dropping and instability in Venezuela increasing, Cuba is hoping for new revenue from liberalized U.S. rules governing American travel to the island. Workers’ wages are not enough to live on, the agriculture sector is starved for investment, and tourism revenue is volatile.

VIEW METHODOLOGY[/paste:font]
Property Rights10.0Create a Graph using this measurement

Freedom From Corruption46.0Create a Graph using this measurement

Corruption remains a serious problem, with widespread illegality permeating the limited private enterprises and the vast state-controlled economy. Freedom of movement is restricted. Only state enterprises may enter into economic agreements with foreigners as minority partners; ordinary citizens cannot participate. Most means of production are owned by the state. The Council of State completely controls the courts and the judiciary.

VIEW METHODOLOGY[/paste:font]
Government Spending0.0Create a Graph using this measurement

Fiscal Freedom52.1Create a Graph using this measurement

Cuba’s top income tax rate is 50 percent. The top corporate tax rate is 30 percent (35 percent for companies with entirely foreign capital). Other taxes include a tax on property transfers and a sales tax. Taxation is not administered effectively. Overall tax revenue is estimated to equal about 37.3 percent of GDP. Inefficient public-sector spending remains high at over 60 percent of total domestic output.

VIEW METHODOLOGY[/paste:font]
Business Freedom20.0Create a Graph using this measurement

Labor Freedom20.0Create a Graph using this measurement

Monetary Freedom65.2Create a Graph using this measurement

Regulatory efficiency remains poor, and private entrepreneurship is limited. The application of regulations is inconsistent and non-transparent. State control of the labor market has spurred creation of a large informal sector. The government still administers most prices and will face inflationary pressures as it proceeds with a plan to eliminate its dual currency system that has long been a source of economic distortions.

VIEW METHODOLOGY[/paste:font]
Trade Freedom64.6Create a Graph using this measurement

Investment Freedom10.0Create a Graph using this measurement

Financial Freedom10.0Create a Graph using this measurement

Cuba’s average tariff rate is 7.7 percent. The country’s centrally planned economy is a significant barrier to the free flow of international trade and investment. The financial sector remains heavily regulated and controlled by the state. Access to credit for entrepreneurial activity is uneven and further impeded by the shallowness of the financial market. The state maintains strict capital and exchange controls.

 

[Bornubus]

RIP one of the greatest revolutionary leaders of all time. According to liberal as well as right-wing clowns, this man is brutal even though he's never started wars. But the US, UK, France, etc. that start illegal wars in ME and kill millions of civilians are champions of democracy.

Actually what happen in ME is Islamic sectarian crap, shia sunni and civil wars against dictatorships. Those Musalman are more responsible to their misery than US or western countries.

Ye tau behti Ganga mn hanth dh rahe hain.

 

[OrangeFlorian]

Will North Korea and Cuba Ever Be Wealthy?

• 

38 COMMENTS
TAGS Global EconomyWorld HistoryPolitical Theory

04/01/2016Ryan McMaken
After years of claiming to embrace revolutionary Marxism, the Cuban state is, for reasons of necessity and pragmatism, moving toward becoming a more traditional authoritarian state. Even once Raul and Fidel Castro are dead, it's rather unlikely that the Cuban government will suddenly turn to a political system that leans heavily in favor of relatively free markets. As has been the case with China, the ruling class of Cuba will find ways to perpetuate itself and maintain political control while keeping for itself a substantial amount of the wealth produced by the labors of the common people. It will likely loosen up on its control of the economy because it recognizes that more-free economies are more productive than less-free economies. But, don't look for Cuba to become a haven for entrepreneurship any time soon.

Even as the economy becomes slightly more free, however, Cuba will remain poorer than most of its neighbors indefinitely, and even if Cuba turned into a Caribbean version of Singapore — something that's exceedingly unlikely — it would remain far poorer than even many of its Latin American neighbors for decades.

This is because, in spite of what our politicians may tell us, people cannot be made more prosperous by the government's simply wishing it to be so. After all, if wealth could be produced by government fiat, then the Cuban and North Korean regimes, neither of which have faced any organized political opposition, have both enjoyed nearly untrammeled power to "improve" the economy without limit.

In real life, though, wealth can only be built through the arduous process of work, saving, and capital accumulation. There is no question that some people can benefit from government mandated redistribution of wealth, but to have wealth, it must first be created by producing things or services of value, and by foregoing consumption now in order to invest and obtain more consumption later.

It's easy to state this, but it is far more difficult to actually do it. And most frustrating of all: even after a society embraces relatively free markets, it can still take decades to achieve a wealthy society by modern standards. And worse yet: in the process of building wealth, many ideologues and politicians will point to the discrepancy between rich and poor countries and blame markets.

The Case of East Germany and Eastern Europe
While there is no such thing as a truly controlled experiment in the fields of economics or politics, we do have some cases that convincingly demonstrate how political revolutions are insufficient to effect an economic one all by themselves.

For example, even 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the areas of Germany that once groaned under the soviet-style regime known as the German Democratic Republic remain poorer than the areas of Germany that once formed what was commonly called West Germany.

In 2014, the Washington Post reported how East Germany has lower levels of disposable income, high unemployment rates, and is generally less prosperous. This in turn has led to the old East Germany having fewer young people, many of whom move west for better jobs.

Fortune's Chris Matthews went on to observe "If you look at statistics such as per capita income or worker productivity, they also point to the large disparity in economic development between east and west."

And Claudia Bracholdt further notes: "Today, Germany’s east has many structural problems similar to those of countries like Greece and Spain, though on a much smaller scale."

During the Cold War, numerous opponents of Communism pointed to Germany as the perfect example of how soviet-style communism destroyed economic prosperity. But that was then. Nowadays, the East German regime is gone, and Germany is, relatively speaking, one of the most market-oriented economies on earth. Eastern Germany shares a government with western Germany. So, why is eastern Germany still poor compared to its western German neighbors?

The answer lies in the fact that even though the legal and political systems in eastern Germany are the same as in the West, the East suffers from the fact that it lost out on decades of capital accumulation and growth in worker productivity while under the boot of the Soviets.

The German case offers the most excellent comparison of course, because prior to World War II, western and eastern Germans enjoyed similar political systems for many decades. Moreover, the western and eastern Germans were similar both ethnically and culturally. Thus, the comparison allows us to focus on regime differences in the age of the Cold War.

We can look beyond just the East Germans as well. We might ask ourselves, for example, why Poland, with its Western orientation and long tradition of parliamentary and decentralized governments remains so relatively poor.

The same might be said of the Czech Republic as well, where the principal city, Prague, was once the second city of the Austrian Empire and was a center of European wealth and culture. The Czechs too, have never regained their relative place in terms of European wealth.

Part of the explanation lies in the fact that the legacy of an abandoned political system can live on for decades even after regime change. As Nicolás Cachanosky has observed in the context of South American regimes:

Institutional changes ... define the long-run destiny of a country, not its short-run prosperity. ... For example, as China opened parts of its economy to international markets, the country started to grow, and we are now seeing the effects of decades of relative economic liberalization. It is true that many areas in China continue to lack significant freedoms, but it would be a much different China today had it refused to change its institutions decades ago.

Clearly, the fact that the old Eastern Bloc countries have moved toward liberalization has set those countries on a path toward greater economic prosperity. That by itself, however, cannot put it on a par with countries that never suffered the effects of decades of communism.

Korea: An Extreme, but Relevant, Example
This will become all the more obvious if and when North Korea's regime collapses, at which point it is likely to be absorbed into South Korea. When that happens, we will then be looking at a country in which the northern areas, in spite of an identical ethnic makeup and an extremely similar long-term history, will be much, much poorer than the southern areas.

Some Germans to this day are resentful of how much in taxpayer wealth poured out of the west into the east. But that will look like nothing compared to the taxpayer wealth that will flow from the South to the North following a reunification of Korea. As the BBC observed:

Incomes in South Korea are 10 to 20 times higher than they are in North Korea — a much bigger gap than that between East and West Germany. That means that if reunification happened, the economic jolt would be much, much greater.

Already, North Koreans who defect find that their skills aren't adequate for South Korea. Doctors who defect from the North often fail to pass standard South Korean medical exams. This all indicates that the immense effort and money required for reunification would dwarf the scale of the task in Germany.

Under such a scenario, all the same issues found in Germany would be magnified many times over in Korea. Younger workers would flock to the south in search of work and education. The North would become a land of impoverished pensioners living off social benefits paid for by southern workers. Only over many decades would capital slowly move north, and North Korea might even take on the characteristics of a frontier state where the economy is based largely on resource extraction, and where labor must be imported from other parts of the country, or even from abroad.

Certainly, this process could be sped up by forced transfers of wealth and capital paid for by the South, but this would of course come at great cost to the southern Koreans.

The Political Backlash
But even when it is self evident that market systems bring greater wealth and prosperity, such changes in Korea and Cuba will bring a political backlash, just as happened, to a certain extent, in Eastern Europe. The social ills present in the newly Westernizing countries will be blamed on "excessive capitalism" as workers migrate to follow capital, leaving behind a hollowed-out economy in the formerly communist areas. Since wealth cannot be made to magically appear everywhere at once, significant poverty will still persist in many areas, but now, instead of being blamed on domestic bourgeois reactionaries, it will be blamed on capitalism in general, and now, the the actual presence of capitalism will make the argument far more convincing. The relative poverty of the old communist areas will endure, in spite of immense gains in standards of living. Capitalists will be blamed for these inequalities as well. As Andrei Lankov wrote in the Korean context:

Affluence and poverty are, essentially, relative categories. There is little doubt that in the first years that follow unification, the average North Korean assembly line worker or rice farmer will compare their new lives with what had been the norm under the Kim family — with such comparisons being decisively in favor of the new system. However, it is only a matter of time, perhaps merely a few years, before the focal point shifts to the contemporary South. North Koreans will begin comparing their lot not with their pre-unification past, but with South Korea’s present, and these comparisons are not going to be very favorable or seriously encouraging.

In other words, scratching out a subsistence under the North Korean regime will be replaced by a drive to keep up with the Joneses. With it will come nostalgia for a "simpler" time and a drive to blame capitalism, yet again, for persistent inequality. The lessons of what prevented affluence in the first place will be quickly forgotten.

Something similar is likely to happen in Cuba. If Cuba continues to slowly liberalize (economically, if not politically) it will nevertheless remain far poorer than the United States, and also Mexico, Chile, and all the so-called "Pacific Pumas" that continue to move toward more market-based economic systems in Latin America.

Consumed by the perceived inequality, the Cubans will then demand "change," but rather than liberalizing further, they may instead go down the path of Venezuela looking to yet another quick fix in what could unfortunately be a nearly endless cycle.

 

[OrangeFlorian]

Brutal dictatorships that actually bothered to listen to uncle miltie and achieve economic prosperity

 

[OrangeFlorian]

Stupid commies don't even take economics into account lol. I'm glad I never went to socialist indoctrination school in india.

 

[Bahamut]

Stupid commies don't even take economics into account lol. I'm glad I never went to socialist indoctrination school in india.

Private school are allowed in India so there is all kind of ideology

 

[OrangeFlorian]

Private school are allowed in India so there is all kind of ideology

There probably run by christians anyway. But still better than left wing Congress socialist education or right wing socialist RSS BJP education.

 

[Heat]

Rss/congi run schools in india...!!! There might be a few here and there but sure they ain't mainstream. You might want to recheck your facts.

 

[OrangeFlorian]

.....................................................................

 

[Bahamut]

There probably run by christians anyway. But still better than left wing Congress socialist education or right wing socialist RSS BJP education.

No there are many society that run school according to their ideology

 

[OrangeFlorian]

Well either way whoever runs the public education system will force the children to worship the government and the state as well as produce paranoid statist goons like*cough* *cough* Nigneet Coondew.

 

[Heat]

Not necessarily. In India a kids political alignment (if any) is affected much more by there parents and families than schools. A child from congi supporter family would hardly support any of the BJPs reform. I am telling this from my own experience.

 

[Voldemort]

RIP one of the greatest revolutionary leaders of all time. According to liberal as well as right-wing clowns, this man is brutal even though he's never started wars. But the US, UK, France, etc. that start illegal wars in ME and kill millions of civilians are champions of democracy.

What kind of Muslim likes a Communist?

 

[Nicky G]

What kind of Muslim likes a Communist?

Come on dude, did you forget the Pakis and their bootlicking of the Chinese? Those Pakis are in effect a communist's colony.

 

[OrangeFlorian]

Never bow down before US and the living standard of Cubans are far better than many so called superpowers.

You sir need to read more mises institute articles

Economic Freedom Snapshot

• 2016 Economic Freedom Score: 29.8 (up 0.2 point)
• Economic Freedom Status: Repressed
• Global Ranking: 177th
• Regional Ranking: 29th in the South and Central America/Caribbean Region
• Notable Successes: None
• Concerns: Rule of Law, Labor Freedom, and Financial Freedom
• Overall Score Change Since 2012: +1.5

Much-touted “free-market reforms” have largely involved only cosmetic changes. The rule of law remains subject to political influence and the overriding interests of the Communist Party. The judiciary’s autonomy is severely impeded by the centralization of power in the one-party state.

BACKGROUND
Fidel Castro’s 84-year-old brother Raúl leads both the government and the Cuban Communist Party. Violent repression of civil society and dissidents has increased dramatically in the past year. Restrictions on foreign travel have been eased, but certain Cubans are still barred from leaving. Cuba depends on external assistance such as remittances from Cuban émigrés and oil subsidies provided by Venezuela for the foreign exchange it needs to survive. With world oil prices dropping and instability in Venezuela increasing, Cuba is hoping for new revenue from liberalized U.S. rules governing American travel to the island. Workers’ wages are not enough to live on, the agriculture sector is starved for investment, and tourism revenue is volatile.

VIEW METHODOLOGY[/paste:font]
Property Rights10.0Create a Graph using this measurement

Freedom From Corruption46.0Create a Graph using this measurement

Corruption remains a serious problem, with widespread illegality permeating the limited private enterprises and the vast state-controlled economy. Freedom of movement is restricted. Only state enterprises may enter into economic agreements with foreigners as minority partners; ordinary citizens cannot participate. Most means of production are owned by the state. The Council of State completely controls the courts and the judiciary.

VIEW METHODOLOGY[/paste:font]
Government Spending0.0Create a Graph using this measurement

Fiscal Freedom52.1Create a Graph using this measurement

Cuba’s top income tax rate is 50 percent. The top corporate tax rate is 30 percent (35 percent for companies with entirely foreign capital). Other taxes include a tax on property transfers and a sales tax. Taxation is not administered effectively. Overall tax revenue is estimated to equal about 37.3 percent of GDP. Inefficient public-sector spending remains high at over 60 percent of total domestic output.

VIEW METHODOLOGY[/paste:font]
Business Freedom20.0Create a Graph using this measurement

Labor Freedom20.0Create a Graph using this measurement

Monetary Freedom65.2Create a Graph using this measurement

Regulatory efficiency remains poor, and private entrepreneurship is limited. The application of regulations is inconsistent and non-transparent. State control of the labor market has spurred creation of a large informal sector. The government still administers most prices and will face inflationary pressures as it proceeds with a plan to eliminate its dual currency system that has long been a source of economic distortions.

VIEW METHODOLOGY[/paste:font]
Trade Freedom64.6Create a Graph using this measurement

Investment Freedom10.0Create a Graph using this measurement

Financial Freedom10.0Create a Graph using this measurement

Cuba’s average tariff rate is 7.7 percent. The country’s centrally planned economy is a significant barrier to the free flow of international trade and investment. The financial sector remains heavily regulated and controlled by the state. Access to credit for entrepreneurial activity is uneven and further impeded by the shallowness of the financial market. The state maintains strict capital and exchange controls.

 

[charlie]

the problem here is people can't differenciate between health and happy life to materialistic life.