Inventory of National and International Legal Instruments Relating to Trade and Investment, Including FDI

The Ministry of Commerce and Industry's inventory of the national and international legal instruments governing trade and investment in Haiti, including foreign direct investment, produced in January 2023 under the sustainability phase of the Enhanced Integrated Framework. The minister's framing is that business law draws on two sources at once, national instruments and international ones, and that legal security for business follows the same bipolar pattern everywhere.

What the count shows is a body of rules that is only half in force. Of the national stock, 120 laws and decrees are in force, 49 percent, against 61 administrative measures at 25 percent, 33 draft and preliminary bills at 14 percent, and 29 proposed texts at 12 percent. On the international side the gap is wider: of 78 international legal instruments signed by Haiti, only 19, or 24 percent, have been ratified and promulgated, and the remaining 59, 76 percent, have had no follow-up to date. Of the trade and investment promotion and protection agreements, four are in force, 29 percent, and ten await ratification.

The inventory also carries the business-environment figures the rules operate on: 71,000 enterprises counted, textiles at more than 90 percent of Haitian exports, post-harvest losses reaching up to 50 percent of production, and commercial bank rates that reflect insecurity risk, against which the central bank has set up guarantee funds to lend at preferential rates of 5 to 10 percent in housing, tourism and industry. Because most of these instruments are shared with other ministries holding their own separate stocktakes, the value of this document is that it puts them in one place, organized by subject and sector.