Last updated on May 19, 2013
At the industrial park, female workers wearing chartreuse aprons and headscarves stream out of the blue factory buildings on their lunch break. Frandline Joseph sits outside. She sews for Sae-A and says she doesn’t like the work: “I don’t have time to sit.”
But she also says that she had no job before her current one, and life has improved since finding employment. “Now I work for 200 gourdes,” [Note: $5 daily — MFB.] she says, and can pay her daughter’s school fees in a country with a virtually non-existent public education system. “Before the park, I worked for nothing.”
Her story is similar to other published accounts, and that of Rosedaline Jean, a 22-year-old who’s worked for Sae-A for five months. “Before, I lived only by the grace of God,” says Jean. “Although I don’t have a husband or children, my life wasn’t easy because I wasn’t working. When I got here, a lot changed in my life.
“This isn’t the ideal job,” she continues, “but it’s better than nothing. I don’t intend to make a career in this job. I plan to start a business, and I’m already saving for it. But it’s difficult, because my salary is practically nothing.”
From an article by Tate Watkins in The Atlantic.
I am often suspicious of industrial policy, but in this case, it looks as though manufacturing might be the key to Haiti’s economic development. Indeed, the country has some agriculture, but it does not see to have the infrastructure necessary to develop the agricultural value chains necessary to rely on agricultural exports as a driver of development.
Because value chains are considerably shorter in manufacturing and are thus are less likely to fail because of a weak link (as agricultural value chains are wont to do), and because the transportation costs between the US and Haiti are very low, there are good reasons to be optimistic. Still, the industrial park could turn out to be a very costly development policy experiment.
But if Haiti truly wants to rely on manufacturing as an engine of development, it will also have to invest in public education, as there is only so much an uneducated workforce can make.
As a side note, Tate Watkins is perhaps my favorite among the handful of journalists who write on development-related issues. He is also one of the few journalists I know of who have a solid understanding of economics.