Resumo

JADOTTE, Evans. Characterization of inequality and poverty in the Republic of Haiti. Estud. soc [online]. 2007, vol.15, n.29, pp.07-56. ISSN 0188-4557.

After nearly twenty years of stagnation and economic decline coupled with political upheavals, the Republic of Haiti, with a GDP per capita of approximately 1,470 USD (expressed in Purchasing Power Parity) in the year 2000, is at this date the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere and one of the poorest of 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 (LAC). Thus, besides the pervasive nature of poverty, income distribution also emerges as a potential stumbling block to growth prospects and should be of high concern for policy makers, let alone be part of a global policy to tackle the poverty scourge. The present research uses the 2001 Haiti Living Conditions Survey, the most recent multi-topic survey for the Republic of Haiti, for distributive analysis and absolute poverty assessment. Preliminary results show that poverty, as expected, is more widespread in the rural area while the Metropolitan area of Port-au-Prince is where the incidence of poverty is the lowest. Surprisingly, access to physical productive asset, such as land, does not help the peasant escape poverty. In addition to the derivation of inequality and poverty profiles, a weighted least square with proper design based for stratified, multistage, and probability cluster sampling is used to additively decompose inequality by multiple factor components. Also, a polychotomous ordered logit is estimated to investigate the risk of being indigent or poor.

Palavras-chave : Republic of Haiti; inequality; multiple factor components decomposition; poverty; stochastic dominance.

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