First Signs of Victory over the Gangs, Sabotage at the Top of the State: The Steep $20 Billion Bill (1995–2024)

As the National Police regains the upper hand on the ground, a lesson in political economy reveals the astronomical cost of our divisions and explains why the country never manages to get back on its feet.

By Réginald Surin

Economist, Research and Business Development Division, SOGEBANK

Port-au-Prince, January 2026

A strange, paradoxical atmosphere hangs over the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area this January 2026. It is an indefinable blend of a new hope that no one dared to voice aloud anymore and an old political weariness that stubbornly refuses to die. For the first time since the total security collapse of 2021, fear has visibly changed sides. The gangs of the “Viv Ansanm” coalition, until recently the absolute masters of the roads and the working-class neighborhoods, are showing unprecedented signs of weakness in the face of a transformed, offensive, and strategic Haitian National Police (PNH). The armored vehicles are advancing, the barricades are falling one after another, and the sovereignty of the state is being reestablished, meter by meter, on the asphalt of the capital.

It is a historic turning point, an unhoped-for window of opportunity for restoring the Republic. Yet at the very moment when the security forces are risking their lives to liberate the country, another threat is emerging, not from the slums, but from the hushed offices of power. The Transitional Presidential Council (CPT) and the Office of the Prime Minister, instead of closing ranks to complete this military victory, are digging in for a new trench war over control of the executive. This spectacle of disunity at the top, in the midst of operational success, is not merely a moral failing or a strategic error; it is economic sabotage, for which we have been paying dearly for thirty years.

As accusations of foreign interference fly from all sides and the protagonists of the current crisis look for scapegoats abroad, a fundamental question deserves to be asked with cold scientific rigor: how much does this chronic inability to govern ourselves really cost us? As an economist, I wanted to go beyond simply noting failure and to quantify what every Haitian feels intuitively. We are prisoners of a vicious circle in which each political crisis buries our chances of development a little deeper. The results of this comprehensive econometric analysis, covering the period from 1995 to 2024 (the last year of consolidated data), are unequivocal and should force us into urgent collective soul-searching. The figure that emerges from our models is brutal: repeated political crises have stripped the Haitian economy of $20.75 billion in cumulative wealth.

UNDERSTANDING THE METHOD: THE CAR THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN RUNNING

To understand how a country can “lose” money it never produced, one has to grasp a fundamental economic concept: Potential GDP. Imagine the Haitian economy as a car. This car has an engine (our resources), passengers (our population), and fuel (investment). If the road is clear and the driver is responsible, this car has a natural “cruising speed.” It may not go as fast as a Ferrari, but it moves forward steadily. This is what is called trend growth.

In Haiti, however, we have spent the last thirty years jerking the steering wheel, slamming on the brakes for no reason, even cutting the engine in the middle of the highway. These deliberate accidents are our political crises: coups d’état, contested elections, the “Pays Lock” operations (nationwide lockdowns), gang violence. My work as an economist consisted of using a sophisticated mathematical tool, called the “Hodrick-Prescott filter,” to virtually erase these accidents along the way and see how fast the car should have been going if we had had normal drivers.

The result of this simulation is damning. If we had simply let the economy run at its natural pace (modest but steady growth of 1.68% a year), we would have produced, year after year, far more wealth than we did. Adding up all this lost output over thirty years brings us to the colossal sum of $20.75 billion. This money is not an accounting fiction. It is the money that should have paid for the roads that do not exist, built the hospitals where we cannot get treatment, and bought the equipment that our police officers so sorely lack today.

THE PROOF IS IN THE ACCELERATION: THE FOUR SEASONS OF HELL

One of the most frightening findings of our analysis is that the destruction of our economy is not constant. It is accelerating exponentially, like a free fall. We divided the thirty years of the study into four distinct periods to observe this deadly dynamic. The table below, the product of our calculations, shows how we went from chronic dysfunction to total collapse.

Table 1: The Acceleration of National Ruin (1995–2024)

This table must be read carefully, for it contains a terrifying truth: more than 50% of the total wealth destroyed in thirty years was destroyed in the period 2019–2024 alone.

This is where a crucial scientific notion comes in: the Threshold Effect. Our statistical tests confirmed, with a very high probability (p-value of 0.038), that there is a point of no return. As long as instability remains moderate, the economy suffers but survives (as between 1995 and 2003). But when instability exceeds a certain critical level, as it has since 2019, the economy no longer merely slows down: it changes regime. It disintegrates. We have gone from annual losses of 0.4% to losses of 19.4%. Scientifically, this means that the current political crisis is not “just another crisis.” It is the one crisis too many, the one that has broken the machine’s deepest springs.

WHY WE NEVER GET BACK UP: THE WEAKNESS OF THE RESTORING FORCE

One question often haunts observers: why do other countries go through crises and recover within two or three years, while Haiti seems to sink ever lower? The answer lies in an econometric parameter that we calculated using a VECM (Vector Error Correction Model): the Restoring Force.

In physics as in economics, the restoring force is the capacity of a system to return to equilibrium after a shock. It is the economy’s elasticity. If you pull on a strong rubber band and let go, it quickly returns to its original shape. Our study reveals that the restoring force of the Haitian economy is tragically weak: it is only 5.66% a year.

Let us take a moment to explain this figure. A speed of adjustment of 5.66% means that when a major shock hits the country (such as the departure of a president or a gang war), it takes the country, mathematically, nearly 18 years to absorb that shock and return to its normal level. 18 years! And the Haitian tragedy is purely one of timing: we produce major political crises every 3 or 4 years, while our economy needs 18 years to heal from a single one of them.

We never have time to heal. We are like a boxer who takes a new punch while he is still down on the canvas, seeing stars from the last one. It is this asymmetry between political time (short and chaotic) and economic time (long and slow) that explains our descent into hell. When the CPT and the Office of the Prime Minister quarrel today, they inflict a new fracture on a body that has not finished healing those of 2021, of 2019, and even of 2004.

THE 2024 BALANCE SHEET AND THE DOMINICAN MIRROR

The scale of our national failure is never measured so well as when it is compared with what we could have been. Looking at the results for 2024, the culmination of our modeling, we can observe three possible futures against which to measure the waste.

Table 2: The Three Possible Destinies (Analysis of the 2024 reference year)

The first finding is the immediate, outright loss. In 2024 alone, because of political paralysis and the gangs, we produced 7.23 billion instead of the 10.05 billion we should have reached with mere stability. The “hole” is $2.82 billion in a single year. That is a 28% handicap. Imagine an athlete forced to run a marathon with a 30-kilo ball and chain attached to his ankle; that is exactly what politics imposes on the Haitian economy.

But most painful of all is the comparison with the third scenario, that of the Dominican Republic. In 1995, the gap between our two countries was not insurmountable. If we had managed to copy their stability and their average growth rate (4.5% a year), our GDP would today be $22.22 billion. We would be a country three times richer. A country with a GDP of $22 billion does not ask Kenya for help in securing its streets; it has the means to maintain a professional army, a high-tech police force, and state-of-the-art intelligence services. The gap of 15 billion between our reality and this potential is the exact price of our political incompetence. It was not fate that created this gap; it was the choice of stability made by our neighbors, and the choice of chaos made by our leaders.

THE INVISIBLE BILL: $1,175 PER FAMILY

Billions of dollars are concepts that can seem abstract to citizens struggling to survive from day to day. It is therefore essential to bring these macroeconomic figures down to a human scale. We divided the annual loss for 2024 (the hole of 2.82 billion) by the Haitian population.

The result is precise: the cost of the political crisis for each Haitian is 235 US dollars a year. For an average family of five, that represents a loss of income of 1,175 dollars a year.

Ask yourself: what would you do with an extra 1,175 US dollars this year? For the vast majority of Haitian families, it is a vital sum. It is the difference between sending your children to school and keeping them at home. It is the difference between being able to pay for emergency surgery and letting a loved one die for lack of care. It is the difference between eating your fill and skipping meals.

These 1,175 dollars are the invisible “political tax” that every family pays without knowing it. It is not a tax collected by the Directorate General of Taxes, but a tax levied by inflation, by unemployment, by business closures, and by the exorbitant cost of living caused by insecurity. When the Presidential Council and the Office of the Prime Minister prolong the crisis by a week, they are not just playing politics; they are reaching straight into every family’s pocket and stealing that money.

THE CURRENT SABOTAGE: WHY UNCERTAINTY KILLS THE RECOVERY

It is armed with this economic understanding that we must judge the seriousness of the political crisis of this January 2026. On the ground, the National Police is creating real economic value. This is a fundamental concept: security is the first of all infrastructures. When the police free National Route 2, they are not just chasing out bandits; they are allowing goods trucks to move, bringing down food prices in Port-au-Prince, allowing farmers in the South to sell their harvests. It is the beginning of a virtuous circle of growth.

But the economy has a fragile psychology. It abhors uncertainty. To invest, to hire, to consume, people need to know what tomorrow will bring. By starting a power struggle at the top of the state in the middle of a police offensive, our leaders are sending a disastrous signal. They are telling everyone: “Careful, don’t celebrate too soon. The state is still unstable. The government could fall tomorrow. Chaos could return.”

This signal is a poison that stops the recovery dead. The investor who was about to reopen his factory sees the news and decides to wait. The merchant who wanted to lower his prices decides to keep them high “just in case.” The diaspora holds on to its money. By creating this political uncertainty, the CPT and the Office of the Prime Minister are actively sabotaging the efforts of the police. They are turning a possible military victory into a certain economic defeat.

CONCLUSION: WE MUST CHOOSE BETWEEN EGO AND SURVIVAL

Economics is no occult science; it is a pitiless mechanism. And that mechanism tells us three things today:

• We have crossed a critical threshold of destruction (the famous threshold effect of 2019).

• We are too fragile to withstand new shocks (our restoring force is too weak).

• We have a unique window of opportunity thanks to the successes of the police.

The $20.75 billion lost is behind us; it cannot be recovered. But the immediate future is still in our hands. If the political class declares an immediate armistice, if it makes the security victory untouchable and finally offers stability, we can begin to climb back up the slope. We can recover part of the 28% of GDP that we are missing today.

But if the games of musical chairs continue at the National Palace while police officers are fighting in the streets, then our leaders will bear a crushing responsibility before history. They will be judged not only for their political incompetence; they will be held accountable for the final ruin of the nation. The figures are there; they do not lie, and they accuse. It is time to stop counting our losses in billions and, at last, to start counting our victories.