Evaluating Against a Multi-Dimensional Economic Goal: A Sustainable and Prosperous Socialism

The concept of evaluation of any existing or proposed policy only has meaning in relation to some goal. Further, if the goal used for the evaluation is not the actual goal of the actor involved, any conclusions about the effectiveness or appropriateness of the policies are irrelevant for that actor. It is very common for people around the world to evaluate the economic policies of Cuba relative to claimed effects on the rate of growth of Gross Domestic product (GDp), followed by discussions on what the real effect on the GDp of the policies has been or will be. Given that Cuba has very explicitly stated that its economic goal is a prosperous, sustainable socialism, such considerations cannot constitute economic evaluations of policies for the country. A proper evaluation is, however, complicated by the multi-dimensional nature of the Island’s economic goal. This article considers six of Cuba’s most fundamental and commonly discussed economic policies as examples, to argue that in practice it is very often, though not necessarily always, possible to design policies in such a way that their evaluation relative to all the dimensions of Cuba’s economic goal does not involve the potential problem of the “trade-off between dimensions” inherent to any multi-dimensional goal.