Fafo-paper 2004:31

Pål Sletten and Willy Egset

Poverty in Haiti

ISSN 0804-5135
2004 27 p

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Haiti has for some time been considered the poorest country in Latin America and the Caribbean, but quantitative data on the living conditions of households have been rare. This paper uses data from the Haiti Living Conditions Survey (HLCS) to analyse poverty in Haiti, defined as household income inferior to 1 dollar per person per day. The HLCS contains multi-topic nationally representative data from 7186 households, collected in 2001, allowing analysis of the geographic, demographic, and socio-economic dimensions of poverty in Haiti.

The data show that poverty is both deeper and more widespread in rural areas than in urban, even when factors such as education and type of work is accounted for, indicating that poverty is a result of place of residence more than household characteristics. Rural poverty is not linked to landlessness or the rural labour market, as most poor households in rural areas own land and are self-employed in either farming or small-scale commerce.