The Vacation Is Over: Implications for the Caribbean of Opening U.S.-Cuba Tourism

The Vacation Is Over: Implications for the Caribbean of Opening U.S.-Cuba Tourism T he trade literature regularly seeks to explain how barriers affect trade. For example, recent work that more tightly linked the workhorse gravity trade model to its empirical applications solved a major puzzle as to why borders reduce trade. 1 Empirical studies have measured export growth after European Monetary Union (EMU) or World Trade Organization (WTO) accession, or the industrialization of China. 2 Similarly, this study seeks to estimate the impact on the Caribbean of normalizing bilateral tourism trade between the United States and Cuba.