The Haitian population has demonstrated resilience and creativity in the face of severe challenges. Marred by political instability, economic mismanagement and exogenous shocks, Haiti has suffered negative economic growth in three decades of the last forty years. Even when economic growth has taken place, it has not been sustained.Haiti’s pattern of socio-economic development has also been characterized by marked inequalities in access to productive assets and public services, the result of exclusionary policies and ineffective public institutions. The resulting widespread poverty has meant that less of the gains from growth, when this has materialized, have been shared by the poor. In turn, the inability of poor Haitians to exploit growth-promoting opportunities for investment in physical and human capital has created a vicious circle of weak economic growth and persistent poverty and inequality.

Following the 2006 presidential and parliamentary elections, the Government of  Haiti and the international community have before them new opportunities to promote inclusive growth. Within this context, the challenge is to identify and implement actions to overcome the legacy of past decades and set Haiti on a path to high, sustained and broad based growth. Constraints to growth and poverty reduction are widespread and severe, and they are interrelated and mutually re-enforcing.

This report is focused on a select list of cross-sectoral binding constraints to growth and poverty reduction which also constitute the minimum functions that a state must fulfill to provide its basic, pure public goods. This means only that these constraints and these functions require priority attention, not that they should be addressed to the exclusion of others that are more sector specific. Indeed, policies aimed at improving additional aspects of the climate for private sector activity in agriculture, manufacturing and services, as well as enhancing the provision of other social services, will need to be implemented, once the critical bottlenecks identified above have started to be tackled.

The Interim Cooperation Framework, prepared in 2005 by the Transition Government with donor participation, identifies priority interventions in several sectors. Also, several recent studies have examined sector specific constraints to growth and poverty reduction which, therefore, have not been discussed in this report. However, the recommendations of those studies need to be part of the elaboration of a comprehensive medium-term growth and poverty reduction strategy for Haiti.