Legislative Agenda of Priority Legal Instruments for Trade and Investment in Haiti

The legislative agenda the Ministry of Commerce and Industry drew from its own inventory of trade and investment law, dated January 2023 and produced under the Enhanced Integrated Framework. It ranks national and international instruments by their expected multiplier effect on the productive sectors and gives an explanatory memorandum for each one selected, which the minister recommends to Parliament for adoption.

The agenda's starting point is a measured ratification gap. On the International Trade Centre's LegaCarta mapping, Haiti has ratified 20.5 percent of the 244 international legal instruments identified, placing it 167th in the world, against 30.28 percent for the CARICOM region, the lowest position in that group. The document is careful with its own arithmetic here: no country reaches 100 percent, and part of the unratified remainder is not destined for ratification at all, so the real gap is well below the nominal 79.5 percent.

On the national side it traces the investment incentive regime rather than restating it: scattered laws on new industries in the 1960s that did not have the expected effects, a first Investment Code in 1983 centralizing tax relief to promote investment and particularly foreign direct investment, then amendments in 1989 and 2002. It flags the 35 percent value-added rule defining a national industry for the purposes of the code's incentives as needing redefinition along with its method of calculation. The instruments it argues for include the Rotterdam Rules, on the ground that 80 percent of world trade moves by sea and the older Hague and Hamburg regimes do not account for electronic data transfer or multimodal shipment, in a country with some 1,771 km of coast.