Haiti and the Cost of Bad Government

There are some Caribbean jurisdictions that are very rich and successful, such as the Cayman Islands. There are others that have middle-of-the-road track records, such as Barbados.

Then there’s the basket case of Haiti.

Here’s data from the World Bank about per-capita economic output, showing how these three jurisdictions compare to both the United States and the world average.

And if you want another perspective, the United Nations’ Human Development Index also shows big gaps (the Cayman Islands is a territory of the United Kingdom rather than an independent nation, so it’s not part of the UN’s dataset).

So why am I citing this data?

Because Lydia Polgreen has a column about Haiti in the New York Times that contains a lot of fascinating history about that unfortunate nation, including the reign of left-wing firebrand Jean-Bertrand Aristide earlier this century.

But I was especially interested in her analysis about the current crisis and what may happen in the future.

Haiti is in free fall. …Gangs, most of which have ties to political and business leaders, have all but shut down Haiti’s economy by cutting off the flow of fuel and food. Hunger is bearing down on many families. Cholera, which once killed around 10,000 people here, is again spreading. …For all its seeming complexity, the current upheaval turns on the same question that has driven almost every crisis on this island for the past 230 years: Who will rule Haiti? …Haiti has long had independence, but where was its true freedom? …What does the world owe Haiti today? First and foremost to leave it alone. To give Haitians the time, space and support to imagine a different future for their own country. ..Over the past dozen years, Haitian politics has grown ever more fractured as the country has been battered by a shattering earthquake and a series of storms and hurricanes. The political scene has been dominated by American-backed center-right leaders… In the absence of a modern industrial economy, the country quickly stratified. There is a mercantile class that makes most of its money importing goods and selling them to everybody else — desperately poor people surviving on subsistence wages and remittances from a thriving diaspora in the United States, Canada, France and beyond. …The first step to helping Haiti fulfill its destiny, to be the independent Black republic its revolution promised, may be for the rest of us to get out of its way.

I’m in favor of Haiti having a stronger and better democracy. That hopefully would lead to improvements in the “rule of law.”

But I fear that Haiti’s economy is mostly being held back by statist economic policy.

The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom ranks Haiti a lowly #150 (out of 177 nations), with failing scores in many categories.

The Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World gives Haiti a somewhat better score (though still a dismal #96 out of 165).

But notice that the nation’s overall level of economic liberty today is lower than it was in the early 2000s, when Aristide was in power.

So if Haiti has been “dominated by American-backed center-right leaders” in recent years, as Ms. Polgreen writes in her column, they obviously are not center-right on economic policy.

The bottom line is that we know the recipe that makes nations economically successful. And we also know that Haiti has not been following that recipe (other than perhaps looking at what works and then choosing the opposite).

So even if the nation somehow achieves perfect democracy, don’t hold your breath expecting a big jump in living standards.

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The Cayman Islands: A Role Model for Harmony and Prosperity

I’m currently in the Cayman Islands, which is one of my favorite places since – like Bermuda, Monaco, Vanuatu, Antigua and Barbuda, and a few other lucky places in the world – it has no income tax.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the absence of an income tax has helped make the Cayman Islands very prosperous, 14th-richest in the world according to the latest data from the World Bank on per-capita economic output (top 10 in the world if you exclude oil-rich jurisdictions).

This does not mean, incidentally, that economic policy is perfect in the Cayman Islands.

There is a overly large and excessively compensated government bureaucracy. Indeed, financing the civil service is becoming such a burden that the Cayman Islands almost made a suicidal decision to impose an income tax earlier this decade.

And the absence of an income tax doesn’t mean an absence of taxes. Here’s a chart from a 2010 report on the jurisdiction’s fiscal challenges. Yes, the tax burden is low compared to many nations, but the government nonetheless collects plenty of revenue from import duties, fees on financial services, and tourism.

But the key thing to understand is that not all taxes are created equal. Some levies impose much more damage than others.

Richard Rahn, a fellow member of the Cayman Financial Review editorial board, explained this insight a few years ago in a column for the Washington Times.

Cayman is prosperous… Critics of Cayman and other offshore financial centers call them “tax havens,” ignoring the fact that they all have many taxes, particularly on consumption — which is good tax policy — rather than on productive labor and capital — which is bad tax policy. The statist political actors in the high-tax jurisdictions will not admit that people do not work, save and invest if they are going to be overly taxed and otherwise abused by their own governments.

And it’s also worth noting that the Cayman Islands are a role model for racial tranquility.

There are people from 135 nations and “mixed” is the largest racial category.

Here are some excerpts from a column published by Forbes about the progressive social structure of the Cayman Islands.

Somebody recently said to me “The Cayman Islands is just a mailbox.”  I started wondering if that was fair. The Cayman Islands are a real places where people live.  And they are not all attorneys and accountants, although they do have more than their fair share.  …a big upside to the Caymans. …Mr. Leung, who is of Asian descent, noticed a whiff of it in Scotland, but finds the Caymans utterly devoid of racism.  Pirates, refugees, shipwrecked sailors and enslaved people might not seem to be the best material to start a country to some, but clearly there is an upside.

I’ll close by noting that there is some trouble in paradise.

The Cayman Islands faces unrelenting pressure from international bureaucracies and high-tax nations. There is a lot of resentment because the jurisdiction is so successful.

The Cayman Islands will not be bullied by countries that cannot compete with this jurisdiction on a level playing field, Premier Alden McLaughlin told an audience… He said that despite the Cayman government’s cooperation on international standards, the Netherlands and others are more concerned about the zero tax rate here. …“But we will not be bullied by those who are jealous of our success, resentful of our tax policies and unable to compete with us on a level playing field,” McLaughlin said.

What makes these attacks so ironic and unfair is that the Cayman Islands actually has much tougher standards than “onshore” nations such as the United States and United Kingdom.

Since I began this column by looking at World Bank data on the most prosperous, let’s wrap up by perusing the U.N.’s numbers.

Hmmm…, lots of so-called tax havens are on this list. I wonder if we can draw any conclusions?

Folks on the left have accused me of “trading with the enemy” for supporting these jurisdictions, but the real story is that we should emulate rather than prosecute these low-tax jurisdictions.

P.S. My affection for the Cayman Islands is mutual.

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