Income Distribution and Poverty in the Republic of Haiti

Abstract

After decades of stagnation and economic decline coupled with political upheavals, the Republic of Haiti is today the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere and one of the poorest in the world. The present research reveals that this country is also where income is worst distributed in the most unequal region of the world, viz., Latin America and the Caribbean. We use the 2001 Haiti Living Conditions Survey for distributive analysis and poverty assessment to try to make manifest the potential links between household well-being and individual socio-economic characteristics. One particular finding is that access to land does not help the poor escape poverty. Complementary to the inequality and poverty profiles constructed herein, a relatively new methodology using weighted least squares for complex survey is adopted to additively decompose inequality by multiple factor components. Also, we estimate a polychotomous ordered logit to investigate the risk of being indigent or poor.

Keywords: Republic of Haiti, inequality, multiple factor components decomposition, poverty, stochastic dominance