\n\n\nNYT\u2019s new series on Haiti\u2019s colonial debt is pretty interesting
Catherine Porter, Constant M\u00e9heut, Matt Apuzzo and Selam Gebrekidan, \u201cThe Ransom:\u00a0The Root of Haiti\u2019s Misery: Reparations to Enslavers,\u201d 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\u2019s dollars. But that doesn\u2019t nearly capture the true loss. If that money had simply stayed in the Haitian economy and grown at the nation\u2019s actual pace over the last two centuries \u2014 rather than being shipped off to France, without any goods or services being provided in return \u2014 it would have added a staggering $21 billion to Haiti over time, even accounting for its notorious corruption and waste.
For perspective, that\u2019s much bigger than Haiti\u2019s 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\u2019s former slaveholders, it would have been spent in the Haitian economy \u2014 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\u2019s economic growth. It\u2019s impossible to know with any certainty what Haiti\u2019s economy would have looked like, and given the history of self-dealing by officials, some historians say the needs of poor farmers\u2026 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. \u201cThere is no reason why a Haiti free of the French burden could not have,\u201d said the financial historian Victor Bulmer-Thomas, who studies the region\u2019s economies. Andr\u00e9 A. Hofman, an expert on Latin America\u2019s economic development, also called this scenario \u201cvery reasonable.\u201d
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\u00a0recently estimated, the country\u2019s per capita income in 2018 could have been almost six times as large \u2014 about the same as in its next-door neighbor, the Dominican Republic.They called the burden imposed on Haiti \u201cperhaps the single most odious sovereign debt in history.\u201d
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
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