afloweroutofstone:

NYT’s new series on Haiti’s colonial debt is pretty interesting

Catherine Porter, Constant Méheut, Matt Apuzzo and Selam Gebrekidan, “The Ransom: The Root of Haiti’s Misery: Reparations to Enslavers,” New York Times, 20 May 2022:

In what leading historians say is a first, we tabulated how much money Haitians paid to the families of their former masters and to the French banks and investors who held that first loan to Haiti, not just in official government payments on the double debt but also in interest and late fees, year after year, for decades.

We found that Haitians paid about $560 million in today’s dollars. But that doesn’t nearly capture the true loss. If that money had simply stayed in the Haitian economy and grown at the nation’s actual pace over the last two centuries — rather than being shipped off to France, without any goods or services being provided in return — it would have added a staggering $21 billion to Haiti over time, even accounting for its notorious corruption and waste.

For perspective, that’s much bigger than Haiti’s entire economy in 2020.

We shared our findings and analysis with 15 leading economists and financial historians who study developing economies and how public debt affects their growth. All but one either agreed with our $21 billion estimate, said it was squarely within the range of possibilities, or considered it conservative. A few suggested additional ways of modeling, which mostly showed far bigger long-term losses for Haiti.

The reason is simple: Had the money not been handed over to Haiti’s former slaveholders, it would have been spent in the Haitian economy — by the coffee farmers, laundresses, masons and others who earned it. It would have gone to shops, school fees or medical bills. It would have helped businesses grow, or seeded new ones. Some of the money would have gone to the government, possibly even to build bridges, sewers and water pipes.

That spending pays off over time, boosting a country’s economic growth. It’s impossible to know with any certainty what Haiti’s economy would have looked like, and given the history of self-dealing by officials, some historians say the needs of poor farmers… would never have been priorities anyway.

But several others said that without the burden of the double debt, Haiti might have grown at the same rate as its neighbors across Latin America. “There is no reason why a Haiti free of the French burden could not have,” said the financial historian Victor Bulmer-Thomas, who studies the region’s economies. André A. Hofman, an expert on Latin America’s economic development, also called this scenario “very reasonable.”

In that case, the loss to Haiti is astounding: about $115 billion over time, or eight times the size of its economy in 2020.

Put another way, if Haiti had not been forced to pay its former slave masters, one team of international scholars recently estimated, the country’s per capita income in 2018 could have been almost six times as large — about the same as in its next-door neighbor, the Dominican Republic.They called the burden imposed on Haiti “perhaps the single most odious sovereign debt in history.”

IIRC taking on the debt was a condition of France dropping an embargo that, with no shipyards on the island, they could never hope to break, I can’t imagine the growth rate would’ve been the same in the alternate universe where they didn’t