Study on the Extent of Corruption Among Private Firms Doing Business with the Haitian State

A June 2011 study on the extent of corruption among private firms doing business with the Haitian state, which places procurement at the center of the question rather than treating corruption as a general governance condition.

It sizes the exposure directly. Public procurement spending has run at more than ten billion gourdes a year for years. The public investment program stood at 48.9 billion gourdes, of which 41.7 billion came from external aid, against 45 billion in 2008-2009 of which 38.8 billion came from international donors. Those proportions are the finding that matters: the great majority of what the state invests is donor money moving through Haitian procurement, so the integrity of that channel determines whether aid reaches what it was given for. The study approaches this from the firms' side, which is the half of the transaction that public audits do not reach.