Haiti and the Challenge of Economic Intelligence.

In late 2024, to gauge the slowdown in Haiti’s trade, International Monetary Fund staff turned to satellite data and high-frequency records of port traffic.¹ National indicators existed, but they arrived neither fast enough nor well enough assembled to inform a decision at the moment it had to be made. Haiti’s whole challenge lies in that gap between information that is available and information that is usable.

Closing that gap is the purpose of economic intelligence. Since France’s Martre report of 1994, the term has referred to the coordinated set of actions by which information useful to economic actors is gathered, processed and distributed so that it can be put to use.² It brings together three functions: monitoring, which tracks the environment and anticipates its shifts; economic security, which protects strategic information, skills and assets; and influence, which defends interests wherever rules, standards and market access conditions are set. What separates it from statistics and research is its test of success, which Wilensky stated as early as 1967: information has value if it reaches the decision-maker clear, reliable and on time.³

This article defends three propositions. Haiti has real information capacities, and an economic intelligence function is beginning to take institutional form; the weakness lies in their dispersion. That dispersion costs more than it would elsewhere, because the country trades and negotiates with partners who read its own economy faster than it does. The next step, finally, is to connect the institution that holds the mandate to those that hold the data, one question at a time, rather than to create yet another agency.

Real capacities, still scattered.

The Institut haïtien de statistique et d’informatique (IHSI) publishes national accounts through fiscal year 2024-2025, which closed with a 2.7 percent fall in output, along with a monthly consumer price index and a quarterly economic activity indicator (ICAE) that showed a 2.1 percent year-on-year contraction in the third quarter.⁴ The Banque de la République d’Haïti (BRH), the central bank, tracks inflation, the exchange rate, reserves, private remittances and international conditions. The Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF) publishes budget data, while customs and the tax administration hold the richest administrative information on formal activity.

On top of this statistical base sit mechanisms whose purpose is explicitly economic intelligence. The Foreign Trade Directorate of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry (MCI) is responsible for monitoring markets and preparing the country’s trade positions, and the PLANAPE project provides for an information platform on exportable products and target markets.⁵ The Centre de facilitation des investissements (CFI), the investment promotion agency overseen by the same ministry, has gone further. It has set up a Directorate of Studies and Economic Intelligence, which in July 2025 began implementing an economic intelligence programme, trained fourteen monitoring officers, established an Economic and Commercial Information Committee to serve as its monitoring unit, and in February 2026 opened an analytical series, Veille Éco.⁶ It would therefore be wrong to say that Haiti is starting from scratch.

This shifts the diagnosis. A customs figure sits with the customs administration (AGD), a price with the IHSI, an analysis of reserves with the BRH, knowledge of a sector with the CFI, the real state of inventories with importers. None of these resources yields a strategic reading on its own. Deeper gaps compound the problem: the last census with published final results dates from 2003, before the earthquake, mass emigration and the internal displacement of more than a million people. The World Bank gives the statistical system a score of 38.7 out of 100. In 2024 the IMF judged the data inadequate for economic surveillance, and the progress it notes in 2026 on data reporting and external sector statistics has yet to be consolidated.⁷ A great deal of information is produced about the Haitian economy; it remains hard to bring together.

Facing better-informed partners.

This dispersion becomes a vulnerability when the other side is better organised. To analyse Haiti’s foreign trade, one turns first to UNCTAD’s databases, whose figures (898 million dollars in exports against nearly 3.4 billion in imports in 2023) are themselves estimates.⁸ Trade with the Dominican Republic is read through the statistics of ProDominicana, broken down by product.⁹ It is normal for a state to know its foreign markets. The difficulty arises when the partner has a more readily usable reading of Haiti’s dependence than Haiti has of its own vulnerabilities.

On 15 September 2023, the Dominican Republic closed its land, sea and air borders in response to the canal dug on the Massacre River. At the time it sold Haiti close to a billion dollars’ worth of goods a year, making Haiti its second-largest customer, and supplied about a quarter of the country’s food.⁹ The questions arose at once: which products are exposed, what volumes pass through each entry point, what stocks exist, what alternative sources are available, which Dominican exporters themselves depend on the Haitian market? The answers existed in part, spread across government departments, importers and border markets. What was at stake was less their existence than the ability to pull them together fast enough to give a shared reading of the country’s exposure and of the leverage it held.

Here the distinction between information and economic intelligence becomes concrete. Knowing how many tonnes of a product were imported last year is information. Establishing, within hours of the closure, how many days of stock remain, which products risk running short and what substitution options exist is already intelligence directed at action. The value comes less from new data than from the speed at which known data are connected to a precise question.

Monitoring, influence and the mastery of time.

Apparel accounts for the bulk of export earnings and goes almost entirely to the United States, where about two thirds of Haitian garments admitted duty-free enter under the HOPE and HELP preferences, the remainder under CBTPA. The 30 September 2025 expiry date had been known for ten years. The preferences lapsed all the same, were restored retroactively only in February 2026, for a single year, and were then extended in September through the end of 2028.¹⁰ For several months the sector operated without knowing whether they would be restored, until when, and how shipments made during the lapse would be treated, an uncertainty that weighs on orders and investment decisions.

Following a file of this kind takes more than knowledge of US trade law. It means watching the congressional calendar, the positions of legislators, the interests of American buyers and the offers of competing countries, while costing out what the loss of preferences would mean for Haiti in jobs, revenue and investment. Monitoring, analysis and influence then form a single strategy. The advocacy was led by the Association des industries d’Haïti and its American allies, with the support of the CFI. The CFI’s Directorate of Studies and Economic Intelligence devoted its first Veille Éco to the subject, published on 6 February 2026, in the days following the restoration of the programme.⁶ The episode shows that a national capacity for strategic analysis is taking shape, and what it still has to win: lead time. An economic intelligence system is judged by the quality of its analyses and, just as much, by the speed at which it detects a change and brings it to the decision-maker.

The informal economy, blind spot and resource.

Copying the systems of highly formalised economies would miss the country. Most employment and a large share of trade escape official records, and insecurity closes entire areas to survey teams. Yet useful information circulates, in markets, among transporters and through trading networks. The Madan Sara, the women traders who supply the country’s markets, know prices, shortages, routes and blocked roads before any bulletin does. Money transfer operators watch the daily movement of remittances worth close to a fifth of GDP. The price surveys of the Coordination nationale de la sécurité alimentaire (CNSA) and FEWS NET already amount to operational monitoring.

The method must therefore be hybrid: administrative data and public statistics, rapid surveys, professional networks, price monitoring, automated collection of online information, satellite imagery and, subject to legal safeguards, aggregated telecommunications and digital payment data. Artificial intelligence and monitoring tools sharply lower the cost of the exercise. They do not say what to watch: a system that gathers millions of data points without knowing which decision they serve remains a technical tool. What the IMF does from Washington, a Haitian team can do from Port-au-Prince, with the advantage of understanding what it is looking at.

Connecting the mandate and the data.

Creating an agency would add one more structure to an already fragmented landscape. The knot is more specific. The CFI now explicitly carries an economic intelligence function, under the supervision of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, which is itself in charge of foreign trade and market monitoring. Yet a large share of the necessary data is produced or held elsewhere: at the IHSI, customs and the tax administration, all three of which fall under the Ministry of Economy and Finance, at the BRH and in the sectoral administrations. The first piece of the architecture is therefore a permanent mechanism for circulating information between the CFI and the MCI, the MEF, the BRH and, depending on the subject, the administrations concerned. It governs data exchange, protects sensitive information and designates an authorised focal point in each institution.

The obstacle is familiar to anyone who has worked with the administration: information there is also a source of power, and it moves poorly from one institution to another. The answer is reciprocity. Each institution that feeds the mechanism receives in return analyses it could not produce alone, starting with the least sensitive data. Donors can contribute through a simple clause: every study funded in Haiti is deposited in a national repository, which would end the scattering of hundreds of surveys and evaluations across the archives of those who commissioned them. Universities, business associations and research firms, which already produce part of this knowledge, are its natural relays.

The first step must be narrow and verifiable. A single question, handled within twelve months: which food products imported from the Dominican Republic can be replaced by competitive local production, and under what conditions? Answering it requires cross-referencing customs data, prices, agricultural data and importers’ accounts, and so tests the whole chain on a subject whose usefulness has been obvious since 2023. Format matters as much as substance: alongside long reports, two-page notes, alerts and scenarios, delivered to the ministers concerned. Success is measured by the number of decisions that refer to them. Textiles, US trade requirements or the skills in demand on the labour market come next, one question after another.

An instrument of sovereignty.

Economic intelligence will remove neither insecurity, nor weak infrastructure, nor the scarcity of finance. It reduces the share of decisions taken when useful information existed but was scattered, or out of reach at the moment it could still have changed the choice. In an economy with no margins, that share costs more than it does elsewhere: a misdirected investment, a poorly prepared trade policy or a dependence spotted too late cannot be made good.

Haiti has more data and more analytical capacity than is generally assumed, and it has begun to institutionalise monitoring. What remains is to organise these resources around the decisions the country has to make: choosing what needs to be known, who assembles it, whom it reaches and when. A country that is observed by satellite can learn to look at itself. Economic intelligence then stops being an imported concept and becomes an instrument of sovereignty.