Haiti has the lowest per-capita GDP of any country in the western hemisphere. The World Bank notes that “more than 6 million out of 10.4 million (59%) Haitians live under the national poverty line of US$ 2.42 per day and over 2.5 million (24%) live under the national extreme poverty line of US$1.23 per day. It is also one of the most unequal countries, with a Gini coefficient of 0.61 as of 2012.”
Back in 2010, after the terrible earthquake that hit Port-au-Prince killed 200,000 people, Haiti was for a time a substantial recipient of foreign aid. But it’s now seven years later. Other disasters have happened. Canada has at times been the single most important foreign aid donor to Haiti, and Haiti was the top recipient of Canadian foreign aid in 2010. But Haiti now by ranks 16th among countries receiving aid from Canada. Thus, the Canadian government decided to fund a study to set priorities for its foreign aid. It provided funding to the Copenhagen Consensus group for the Haiti Priorise project, which carried out benefit-cost studies on a number of possible aid priorities.
It’s worth noting that the specific numbers in benefit-cost calculations are always a little shaky: if you are comparing two policies with benefit-cost ratios of, say, 4.2 and 3.5, it’s probably fair to conclude that for practical purposes they are about the same. But a lack of perfect precision doesn’t mean a lack of any insight. If the benefit-cost calculations find that fortifying wheat flour with micro-nutrients has a benefit-cost ratio of 24, while building pit latrines in urban areas has a benefit-cost ratio of 0.9, then it’s sensible to decide (at least provisionally, barring some dramatic change in the available information) that one option is strongly preferable to the other.
If you want to look over the research behind Haiti Priorise recommendations, this page offers the links to each of the presentations of evidence; in turn, each page has a link to an underlying background paper.
Here’s a list of the policy options where the benefit-to-cost ratio is 11 or higher, with the benefit-to-cost ratio listed first and the policy option afterward. Thus, wheat flour micro-nutrient fortification has a benefit-to-cost ratio of 24. If you want more information, the presentation is here and the underlying paper, written by four professors at UC-Davis, is here.
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