Why is Haiti such a mess?

Widespread corruption and economic stagnation – the poor island country is a mess. But Haiti's problems go beyond low average test scores.

Written by Noah Carl.

By all accounts, Haiti is still at the roving bandit stage of state formation. The country’s previous leader, Jovenel Moïse, was brutally assassinated by a group of foreign mercenaries for reasons that are somewhat murky. (Dozens of people have been charged, including his own widow.) Haiti’s most recent leader, Ariel Henry, resigned after he was unable to return from a trip to Kenya because gangs had laid siege to the international airport.

According to The Economist, gangs presently control 80% of the capital city, Port-au-Prince. In recent weeks, they have not only laid siege to the international airport, but have also carried out a major jail break and taken over several government buildings. “The Haitian police and military are outnumbered,” the magazine notes, “and in many cases outgunned”.

Haiti’s economic fortunes are no better than its political ones. Data published by the World Bank indicate that real GDP per capita is lower now than it was in 1960 – meaning the country hasn’t seen sustained economic growth in more than half a century. Though even these data are questionable, since they show only a minor downtick associated with the devastating 2010 earthquake, which killed over 200,000 Haitians.

Haiti is the eighth most corrupt country in the world and by far the poorest in the Western hemisphere. The next poorest country, Honduras, has a GDP per capita almost twice as large. This is despite the fact that Haiti enjoys several geographic advantages, including a natural harbour, rich mineral deposits and proximity to the world’s largest economy. Why is the country such a mess?

The most important reason is lack of human capital. Haiti scores 338 on the World Bank’s measure of Harmonised Test Scores, which is more than 1.8 standard deviations below the UK – the equivalent of 27 IQ points. So if Britain has an IQ of 100, Haiti has an IQ of 73.¹ But low average test scores aren’t the whole story.

Source: Harvard Gazette.

You may recognise the woman pictured above as Claudine Gay, the erstwhile president of Harvard who ignominiously resigned following accusations of plagiarism and the controversy surrounding her handling of anti-Semitism allegations. (Don’t feel too sorry; she still takes home almost $900,000 a year).

One thing you may not know about Gay is that she is the daughter of Haitian immigrants. And not just any Haitian immigrants. Her father is vice president of Haiti’s sole ready-mix concrete supplier, GDG Béton. (Her uncle happens to be president.) This may explain how she was able to attend the exclusive Phillips Exeter Academy – a $67,000 a year boarding school that boasts Lincolns and Rockefellers among its alumni.²

Born overseas to an elite Haitian family, Gay exemplifies one of the most pressing social trends affecting the poor island country: brain drain.

In 2005, Frédéric Docquier and Abdeslam Marfouk compiled census and register data from OECD countries in order to count the number of low, middle and high-skilled migrants from each country around the world. They then compared theses numbers with the educational distributions in the countries of origin. In the case of Haiti, they reported a high-skilled emigration rate of 84% for the year 2000, which means that 84 out of every 100 high-skilled Haitians were living in the OECD (mostly the US and Canada).

In 2013, Herbert Brücker and colleagues carried out a similar exercise to obtain updated emigration rates. In the case of Haiti, they reported a high-skilled emigration rate of 85% for the year 2010. Their database also shows that as early as 1980 over 65% of high-skilled Haitians were living abroad. Haiti’s brain drain is therefore not a recent phenomenon, although it does appear to have gotten worse over time.³

Every year since 2006, the Fragile States Index has rated countries on various indicators that contribute to the risk of state fragility and state collapse. One such indicator is “Human Flight and Brain Drain”. In the latest version of the index, Haiti is ranked eleventh out of 179 countries on this indicator, and as recently as 2015 it was ranked first. This is consistent with reports that high-skilled emigration rose sharply following the 2010 earthquake.

Haiti suffers not only from international brain drain, but also from internal brain drain. As Nicolas Lemay-Hébert and colleagues note, many high-skilled Haitians who might otherwise work in the private sector or the government bureaucracy are incentivised to join international organisations – which can offer them higher salaries thanks to generous foreign funding. “Internal brain drain is fuelled by the recruiting procedures of IOs or INGOs,” the authors note. “They act like an artificial market, crowding out human capital”.

Although most high-skilled Haitians who emigrate do so of their own accord for quite understandable reasons, some have been actively recruited through state-sponsored programs in francophone parts of Canada. One of the world’s richest countries is poaching nurses and doctors from one of the world’s poorest. In fact, Haiti consistently features on the WHO Safeguard List of countries facing a critical shortage of healthcare workers.⁴

Some economists maintain that skilled migration is actually good for sending countries, but their arguments aren’t convincing – as I’ve mentioned before. They can’t explain why fast-tracking visas for highly qualified Russians would be an effective way to destabilise Russia’s economy, yet doing the same for highly qualified Haitians would somehow have the opposite effect. The simple fact is that high-skilled people have positive externalities on those around them, so when they leave their home countries the people left behind are worse off.

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s what the Haitian-born social scientist Louis Marcelin had to say to the Miami Herald:

How can a country rebuild itself if 80% of its educated young workforce are among those leaving the country? A country cannot rebuild itself if it doesn’t have the human power, educated, skilled youth to help implement the kind of policy recommendations that will emerge from any kind of analysis of social issues.

His sentiments are echoed by Conor Bohan, founder of the Haitian Education and Leadership Program, who spoke to Newsweek about the situation in Haiti:

Take the place where you work, and tell 84% of the employees with a college degree not to show up tomorrow morning. Replace them all with people, a third of whom have a high school degree, a third who have a ninth-grade education, and a third who have a sixth-grade education … Now, take that same scenario, and try to build a country and organize a government. The whole thing falls apart … It is impossible to make progress and rebuild the country if the educated classes keep fleeing.

One has to keep a sense of perspective, of course. It’s not as if Haiti would be an advanced economy – some kind of Denmark in the Caribbean – in the absence of brain drain. It would still be a backward place. But there are degrees of backwardness. Some African countries with similar demographics enjoy living standards more than twice as high. And they don’t have the advantage of being located just south of the USA.⁵

While Denmark may not be a realistic model for Haiti, I think it’s fair to say the country is underperforming. (When gangs control 80% of the capital, there’s surely some room for improvement.) One major reason is that many of the smartest, hardest working Haitians simply pick up and leave, hoping to make a better life elsewhere. While from the migrants’ perspective this is entirely rational, the end result is a country largely bereft of human capital. No amount of foreign aid is going to fix that.

Noah Carl is an Editor at Aporia Magazine.

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1. Haiti has an unweighted average IQ of 78 in the latest version of Lynn and Becker’s database. However, this is based on two small samples from 1974 and 1981, respectively. The earlier sample yielded a corrected IQ of 97; the later one yielded a corrected IQ of 60.

2. Gay may have won a scholarship to Phillips Exeter, but I couldn’t find any information to suggest that she did. Interestingly, the feminist writer Roxane Gay, who is Claudine’s cousin, also attended the school.

3. According to Brücker and colleagues’ database, there were 235,000 high-skilled Haitians living in the US and Canada in 2010. There were also many low and middle-skilled Haitians living in those countries.

4. The latest version of the Barro-Lee dataset reports that less than 1% of Haitians have a tertiary education.

5. Haiti’s proximity to the US is both a blessing and a curse, since it’s a major reason why so many high-skilled Haitians have left.