Shocks and Poverty in Haiti

The slides use the ECVMAS dataset collected by the World Bank and the Government of Haiti, which records 18 shocks and 35 coping strategies for 4,930 households. Households are grouped as extreme poor (29%), poor (19%), vulnerable (10%) and resilient (42%), and shocks are classed as idiosyncratic economic, covariate economic and covariate weather or climatic. The average household experienced 2.7 types of shocks, 89% experienced at least one shock in the prior 12 months, and rural households experienced more shocks than households in Port-au-Prince.

Weather shocks hit 73% of extreme-poor households compared with 46% of resilient ones, while resilient households were more likely to report crime. Coping differs by poverty status: 23% of extreme-poor households changed their food intake in response to their main shock compared with 10% of resilient households, and resilient households were twice as likely to rely on non-loan monetary help from outsiders. The background slide lists Hurricane Jeanne in 2004, the cyclones of 2008, the January 2010 earthquake and the 2012 hurricanes.