Now, might I suggest hypothesis number 3, which is that endemic corruption and the absence of the rule of law make it nearly impossible to invest in or trade with Haiti.  Let’s just look at a few pieces of data:

In an International Finance Corporation project in 2012 called Doing Business, Haiti was ranked 187 out of 189 countries surveyed in terms of ease of starting a business.

I would suggest that any discussion of how to alleviate world poverty, or for that matter “income inequality,” needs to begin by looking at actual countries out there to see what works and doesn’t.  Granted, it’s not possible to do a controlled laboratory-type experiment in the field of economic policy.  On the other hand, 190 or so countries all trying somewhat different things can generate a lot of data.

So there we have Haiti, sitting just a few hundred miles southeast of Miami, and it’s about as dirt poor as you can get.  Here is a Wikipedia site that aggregates per capita GDP data for all countries of the world for 2013 from the IMF, the World Bank, and the CIA.  Note that, particularly for smaller and poorer countries, the numbers can differ substantially from one source to another.  But Haiti is right near the bottom no matter which source you choose: $1315 according to the IMF; $1703 per the World Bank; and $1300 per the CIA.  (By comparison, the U.S. is at approximately $53,000 in per capita GDP in all three rankings.)  And, what’s more, there have been no recent improvements in the Haitian economy, and there are few prospects for improvement in the immediate future.  Surely there is something those Haitians could sell to the United States to make some money!  How is it even possible for them to maintain this level of poverty?

Perhaps, influenced by the terrible post-colonial history of sub-Saharan Africa, you are thinking of a hypothesis that Haiti is poor because all black-dominated countries are poor.  Well, as Einstein famously said (actually, this may be apocryphal, but the quote is widely attributed to him), “a single experiment can prove me wrong.”  In the case of the hypothesis that all black-dominated countries are poor, there are multiple counterexamples that prove it wrong.  Number one is Bermuda (55% black), which is at the very top of the income distribution of countries, ranking way ahead of the United States in the CIA ranking (at $86,000) and just behind the U.S. per the World Bank (at $53,030)….

As hypothesis number 2, there is the theory that Haiti is poor because it is being exploited by the evil rich capitalist countries.  According to data here from Wikipedia, Haiti’s exports in 2012 were $801 million — around $800 per person in a country of about 10 million people, which is rather pitiful.  It seems that the rest of the world is just staying away, perhaps because Haiti doesn’t have much to sell — but it’s hard to call that “exploitation….

Now, might I suggest hypothesis number 3, which is that endemic corruption and the absence of the rule of law make it nearly impossible to invest in or trade with Haiti….

And finally, let us consider foreign aid.  Haiti is perhaps the all-time champ of foreign aid.  If foreign aid worked to raise a country up out of poverty, then Haiti would be a rich country.  The Center for Global Development (no enemies of foreign aid) here has a history of foreign aid in Haiti, including the statistic that by 1970 “foreign assistance was 70% of the Haitian national treasury revenues” and proceeded to increase from there…

But the title of this report from Foreign Policy In Focus in January says it all:  Haiti: billions in Aid, Pennies in Progress since Earthquake.  You really need to read the whole thing to see how one government-imposed obstacle after another has kept Haiti from moving forward.

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