Réginald Surin
Haitian economist, bank executive, and columnist · author of the Autopsie column
Réginald Surin is a Haitian economist, bank executive, and columnist. His work deals in particular with the Haitian economy, institutions, public policy, and social change. He writes “Autopsie,” a column published in Le Nouvelliste.
He heads Research and Business Development at one of the country’s three largest commercial banks, and spends his free time plowing the field of ideas.
His interests are institutional economics, game theory, and spatial econometrics, applied to Haiti’s structural crises: the dynamics of armed violence, governance, tax policy, financial exclusion, the microstructure of the foreign exchange market.
Background
He trained as a quantitative economist at the Center for Planning Techniques and Applied Economics, after his schooling at the Petit Séminaire Collège Saint-Martial. The master’s degree in money, banking, and insurance came much later, at the University Institute of Sciences, once practice had raised questions of its own. His first position, in 2013, was at the United Nations Development Programme, working on poverty maps.
What followed placed him, one after another, on all four sides of the same economy. First the state’s side, in the Directorate of Economic Studies and Forecasting at the Ministry of Economy and Finance: the macroeconometric models that underpin the budget framework, forecasts of remittances and exports, estimates of what natural disasters cost the public finances. Then the donor’s side, at the Inter-American Development Bank, where the job was to make Haiti’s data series comparable with those of its neighbors. Then the side where decisions are made, at the Office of the Prime Minister, as economic adviser and then coordinator of the economic unit on the prime minister’s staff, where analysis stops being an exercise and becomes a matter of trade-offs. Finally the market’s side, in asset management, where you stake money on your own forecasts. A consulting practice ran alongside all of this. Today he heads Research and Business Development at one of Haiti’s three largest commercial banks, advises the Ministry of the Environment in a technical capacity, and serves as national focal point for the Green Climate Fund.
This career does not so much accompany the column as explain it. You do not read a number the same way once you have seen it used, in turn, to forecast, to decide, to invest, and to lend.
The Autopsie column
Since the summer of 2025, he has written “Autopsie” for Le Nouvelliste. To date, 54 pieces have appeared, 31 of them translated into English by the paper.
The approach comes down to a single move: take a question that public debate treats as moral or political, and recast it as a problem of incentives, costs, and equilibria. Police corruption becomes an equation, with its parameters and its solutions. The repeated failure of street-vendor evictions is explained by three location models half a century old. A coalition of armed groups can be described with game theory, and that description shows where it may give way.
Research
His research focuses on the dynamics of Haitian inflation and on the structure of time deposits; a study now in progress, based on a vector error correction model, examines what the former does to the latter. As part of his duties at the Ministry of Economy and Finance, he is among the co-authors of two World Bank reports on Haiti, one on competitive conditions in the economy, the other on the fiscal cost of disasters. Both are reproduced here in full.
In the press
Le Nouvelliste ran a profile of him, written by its editor-in-chief. AlterPresse interviewed him about how a war fought twelve thousand kilometers away ends up showing in the prices of a Caribbean market.
Beyond Haiti, his work has been picked up twice. Listín Diario, the leading Dominican daily, built an entire article around one of the columns: the one that puts figures on the arsenal and finances of the armed groups. In Spain, El Español took up his formula on elites in a survey of Latin American democracy. It is neither their origins, nor their wealth, nor their personalities that determine their behavior, but the architecture of incentives that precedes them and rewards them.
Citations in research
War Watch, the armed-conflict analysis portal of the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights, cites the column “The New Era of Viv Ansanm” in its entry on Haiti, in support of a reading of the infighting within the Viv Ansanm coalition: violence that disciplines non-aligned groups rather than signaling fragmentation.
The Haiti Working Group, which met on 18 June 2026 to discuss the economy and job creation, cites him twice in its report: first on the mechanisms of rent, then in its conclusion. The text cited is the English edition of “Haiti Is Not Collapsing, It Is Being Held in Place”.
Transparency note
Independence of the column
“Autopsie” is a strictly personal intellectual undertaking.
The analyses published under this byline are the author’s alone. They do not represent the position of any institution, any employer, or any organization with which the author is or has been associated. They are solicited by no one and commissioned by no one.
They are separate from the author’s professional and institutional roles, which these texts neither commit, nor call upon, nor represent. No confidential data obtained in the course of those roles is used in them. The sources relied on are public and cited.
Declaration of interests
The author serves as a technical adviser to the Ministry of the Environment and as national focal point for the Green Climate Fund. These roles are technical and carry no political position. The column covers neither the ministry’s decisions nor the Fund’s allocations in Haiti.
Publication rights to the columns belong to Le Nouvelliste. This site reproduces 39 of them in full, each bearing, at the top and at the bottom, a note of its original publication and a link to the article in the paper. The other entries are limited to the title, the date, a summary written for this site, and the link to the article. Any request from the paper’s editors would be honored without delay.
This site
It sells nothing, carries no advertising, puts up no paywall, and has no comments section. No trackers are planted in these pages: no cookies, no browser fingerprinting, no analytics scripts. The fonts are hosted here, on this site, so no request goes out to a third party while you read.
One caveat, because it is owed. The host counts the pages served from its own logs, as any server that answers a request does, and the author checks these records to see whether his texts are being read. They are aggregated, kept for a week, and cannot be used to recognize anyone from one visit to the next. Search-engine indexing is monitored with the tools Google makes available to publishers, which measure on Google’s side, not here.
Only one page contains executable code: the index of columns, where two kilobytes of script served from this domain hide the rows that do not match what you type. It loads nothing, sends nothing, records nothing. Without it, the search box does not even appear, and the topic filters, which are real pages, keep working.
There are no exceptions. If you want to be notified when the book comes out, the button opens a message in your email program: you write to the contact address, nothing is recorded anywhere else, and you stop being notified by asking.
Biographical note
May be reused freely for an invitation, a program note, or a press kit.
Réginald Surin is a Haitian economist. He trained at the Center for Planning Techniques and Applied Economics and holds a master’s degree in money, banking, and insurance. He has worked at the United Nations Development Programme, the Ministry of Economy and Finance, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the Office of the Prime Minister. He now heads Research and Business Development at one of Haiti’s three largest commercial banks, advises the Ministry of the Environment in a technical capacity, and serves as national focal point for the Green Climate Fund. He writes “Autopsie” for Le Nouvelliste and is preparing a book-length essay, L’Anatomie de la Fracture.
Contact
Press, research, editorial proposals: contact page.