Keywords
Economic growth
Abstract
This article studies Haiti’s sovereign debt between the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the ’60s. It also analyzes the loans Haiti contracted over this long period in the international market on a bilateral basis. The analyze is focused on the consequences caused by the loans in Haiti’s economic growth, in terms of how they were spent, their relationship with the real sector dynamics, the operation of the bureaucratic apparatus, and the authoritarian and repressive institutions. This approach allows us to question many theses held about the sovereign debt issue. Still, this case study’s conclusions cannot go past a certain theoretical framework due to Haiti’s capitalist economy’s small size.
This paper is based on several series of statistical data, archived materials, and various press releases.