26947: Phillipe: (reply) Re: 26926: Morse (ask) Jobs in Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

On Sunday, 18 December 2005 11:55, you wrote:
> From: OLOFFSONRAM
>
> I've been reading and re-reading Heinl's Written In Blood and it
> suddenly struck me that no one has ever had a plan for 2 to 3
> hundred thousand jobs in Haiti. What hope is there for
> fundamental change in Haiti without  work?

Allow me to make an attempt at some answers. But, first, let me say
that the focus should not be on jobs per se. Rather, it should be
on creating an appropriate environment for investments that will
generate jobs. I realize this may be nitpicking, but the
distinction might be important. How you phrase a problem may lead
to inappropriate answers.

Starting from the obvious, that is, everything is still to be built
in Haiti, we can reasonnably assume that we need to start with the
basics. If the goal is a free and democratic society, then that
society will be based on individual freedoms and property rights.
In that case the first task of the state is to identify its
citizens and what property they own.

There are a lot of measures of economic development. International
organizations keep coming up with more. But we only need one number
to measure the process of development: the rate of change of
productivity. The higher it is, the faster we will grow. Therefore
we need to concentrate on the factors that make societies
productive. There are several but one indisputable factor is urban
density. Three other indicators are the speed at which people and
materials move about; how fast information is transferred, from one
point to another or from one person to another; and how much energy
is made available.

Two other factors, largely political, are also important. The first
is how autonomous municipalities are or can be. In fact, in
general, it seems that the more independant institutions a society
has, the more developed it is. The last factor I'll mention, the
most critical one, the sine qua non, is how a society fights
cheating and cheaters.

Given these premises, what we need is a programme whose main
objective is to rapidly increase productivity. This programme would
be based on:

- serious reform of the "Ãtat civil";
- the creation of a complete cadastre;
- systematic encouragement to migration towards the cities;
- building roads
- considerably increasing the supply of electricity;
- creating a good telecommunications infrastructure;
- allowing maximum autonomy to municipalities;
- setting up a judiciary dedicated to the elimination of cheating
and cheaters.

I have hardly mentionned jobs. And yet, I believe that as outlined
here, this programme would create an environment where investment
in the future would be possible. In turn these investments would
create hundreds of thousand of real, permanent, useful and
productive jobs over a few short years.

Philippe