Inflation in Haiti

A short history of inflation in Haiti

Instability and the Gourde (2018 onwards)

Haitian inflation reflects a state that has struggled to function. Successive political crises, the assassination of the president in 2021 and the spread of armed gangs across the capital have disrupted the ports through which almost all food and fuel arrive, while the government has financed itself substantially through the central bank because it cannot collect enough tax.

The gourde has fallen heavily as a result, and for a country importing most of its rice and all of its fuel that translates directly into prices. Removing fuel subsidies in 2022 added to it. Inflation here is a symptom of the security situation more than of anything monetary policy could address alone.

Post-Covid Inflation (2021 to 2023)

In Haiti, prices rose fastest in January 2023, at 49.3%. The causes of the post-Covid inflation were global in nature, beginning with the lockdowns: factories and ports closed and the shipping between them fell out of sequence, so goods took longer to make and longer to arrive. Governments had spent heavily supporting household incomes through those closures, so when restrictions lifted there was money waiting to be spent and not enough on the shelves to spend it on. Then in February 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine, disrupting two of the world's largest suppliers of wheat, fertiliser, oil and gas at once, and the cost of everything grown, heated or transported rose with them.

Because the causes were shared, so was the timing: most countries peaked within a few months of one another in late 2022. The major inflation events covers this episode and the others in more detail.