It's interesting to see Haiti's poor agricultural productivity being blamed on small scale household farming, because exactly the opposite argument has been made to explain the Asian "development miracle". In How Asia Works, Joe Studwell traces the origin of economic takeoff in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan to land reforms that redistributed big landholdings into family plots, which could be cultivated intensively to generate an economic surplus, and the proceeds helping to kick-start industrialization. The Philippines, where land reform stalled, provided a negative comparison.
Why did you ignore how Haiti invaded and occupied what is now the Dominican Republic from 1822 to 1844 with the excuse of abolishing the little existing slavery and then prohibited Dominicans from speaking Spanish, practicing Catholicism, studying at the university and imposing part of the debt contracted with France?
Haiti was born as a hostile, racist and criminal nation against the Spanish-speaking people of the island. Hence, we Dominicans do not have the slightest confidence in Haitians.
Good comments I guess many are indeed true and factual But as is often the case the spiritual component (which is 90 to 100 % of the problems) in the world is dismissed As the enemy of your soul continues to steal, kill and destroy you report the results natural solutions are thrown at spiritual manifestations and they dont work satan who is the god of this world has been influencing the mind of men since the garden and will continue until the Lord returns.
I have some sympathy for the difficulty of summarizing and comparing the economic histories of two complicated countries in just a few pages. However, cherry-picking and key omissions (and some errors) really undermine this outing by a leading scholar on Haiti. Some examples:
-The supposed theft of $2 billion by the Martelly government is a political number from the opposition. About a third of that was spend on electricity subsidies, a share went to social programs, and a share went to build various civil works. Was there graft involved? No doubt. But there is no need to exaggerate the problem.
- the DR and Haiti were occupied by the US at the same time, but only in the DR conducted a census. How is that evidence of Haiti’s disorganization?
- Dominican elites would travel to Port au Prince to go shopping through much of the mid-20th century. It may not be that Haiti fell behind the DR earlier than the 1950s, simply that the elites got more of what there was.
- The balance of payments does not support massive graft by the Duvaliers (the transfer problem). Much of the Duvaliers’s « wealth » was in shares of companies that got quietly erased as soon as they were gone.
- Much of Haitian export industry, which was growing in the 1980s, was wiped out by the US embargo. Nothing much to do with economics. And Haiti had tourism before the DR, famously including the Clinton honeymoon, but it specialized in African-American tourism before civil rights opened other destinations.
I will stop here, but a history of US Marines+Duvaliers looks a lot like US Marines+Trujillo/Balaguer. For the number of articles written on this divergence, we should understand it better. But that requires more work than putting up a satellite photo showing that Haiti is in the rain shadow of the mountainous border (because trade winds blow from the east) and claiming it as evidence of deforestation.
A lot of discussion of symptoms without addressing the elephant causing them.
It's interesting to see Haiti's poor agricultural productivity being blamed on small scale household farming, because exactly the opposite argument has been made to explain the Asian "development miracle". In How Asia Works, Joe Studwell traces the origin of economic takeoff in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan to land reforms that redistributed big landholdings into family plots, which could be cultivated intensively to generate an economic surplus, and the proceeds helping to kick-start industrialization. The Philippines, where land reform stalled, provided a negative comparison.
Why did you ignore how Haiti invaded and occupied what is now the Dominican Republic from 1822 to 1844 with the excuse of abolishing the little existing slavery and then prohibited Dominicans from speaking Spanish, practicing Catholicism, studying at the university and imposing part of the debt contracted with France?
Haiti was born as a hostile, racist and criminal nation against the Spanish-speaking people of the island. Hence, we Dominicans do not have the slightest confidence in Haitians.
Good comments I guess many are indeed true and factual But as is often the case the spiritual component (which is 90 to 100 % of the problems) in the world is dismissed As the enemy of your soul continues to steal, kill and destroy you report the results natural solutions are thrown at spiritual manifestations and they dont work satan who is the god of this world has been influencing the mind of men since the garden and will continue until the Lord returns.
Haiti genocided it’s whites.
bla bla bla bla
I have some sympathy for the difficulty of summarizing and comparing the economic histories of two complicated countries in just a few pages. However, cherry-picking and key omissions (and some errors) really undermine this outing by a leading scholar on Haiti. Some examples:
-The supposed theft of $2 billion by the Martelly government is a political number from the opposition. About a third of that was spend on electricity subsidies, a share went to social programs, and a share went to build various civil works. Was there graft involved? No doubt. But there is no need to exaggerate the problem.
- the DR and Haiti were occupied by the US at the same time, but only in the DR conducted a census. How is that evidence of Haiti’s disorganization?
- Dominican elites would travel to Port au Prince to go shopping through much of the mid-20th century. It may not be that Haiti fell behind the DR earlier than the 1950s, simply that the elites got more of what there was.
- The balance of payments does not support massive graft by the Duvaliers (the transfer problem). Much of the Duvaliers’s « wealth » was in shares of companies that got quietly erased as soon as they were gone.
- Much of Haitian export industry, which was growing in the 1980s, was wiped out by the US embargo. Nothing much to do with economics. And Haiti had tourism before the DR, famously including the Clinton honeymoon, but it specialized in African-American tourism before civil rights opened other destinations.
I will stop here, but a history of US Marines+Duvaliers looks a lot like US Marines+Trujillo/Balaguer. For the number of articles written on this divergence, we should understand it better. But that requires more work than putting up a satellite photo showing that Haiti is in the rain shadow of the mountainous border (because trade winds blow from the east) and claiming it as evidence of deforestation.