The Impoverishment of Haiti's Middle Classes and its Economic and Social Consequences

A conference paper for UNRISD arguing that Haiti's social movement has suffered for decades from the absence of a major actor: the middle classes, whose impoverishment removed both a political constituency and an economic function.

It takes the measurement problem seriously rather than assuming the category. Among people who could belong to the middle strata by income, self-identification is contrasted: 30 percent identified with the upper class and 20 percent with the middle classes, so the group is not self-aware in the way the concept requires. It applies the OECD and ECLAC threshold, membership defined as income between 50 and 150 percent of the median, and sets Haiti against the regional projection of roughly 300 million consumers whose purchasing-power-parity income would place them in that band.

The distributional figure that anchors the argument is at the top rather than the middle: the top 1 percent of the population commands a budget 50 times larger. A middle class defined by distance from both ends cannot form where the distance at one end is that great, which is the paper's structural claim rather than a lament about living standards.