In recent years, the IMF has released a growing number of reports and other documents covering economic and financial developments and trends in member countries. Each report, prepared by a staff team after discussions with government officials, is published at the option of the member country.

Following the 2010 earthquake catastrophe, this book examines the economic and political challenges facing Haiti. It presents an overview of the country's economic history, and seeks new prospects for economic growth and development in the future.

This important study introduces the conceptual premise that families, like firms, analyze their circumstances, make decisions, and pursue courses of action on the basis of what they perceive to be the most efficient methods for producing and reproducing survival. Combining this premise with an extraordinary assemblage of facts gleaned over the period of a decade from the streets, markets and homes of Port-au-Prince, the author weaves a tapestry of despair and hope which only an unusual degree of intimacy with the details of everyday life in the city could provide. The result is a considerable deepening of understanding about the politics and economics by which family members earn their livelihoods, distribute resources within and between households, produce life and labor from food and water, provide shelter and schooling for themselves, and borrow money to finance these and other activities. These different dimensions of daily existence form a web of interdependency in which change in any one dimension causes change in all the others. As Professor Pass's work demonstrates, research and development assistance practices of public and private organizations, in such areas as employment, health, housing, education and credit are often irrelevant. This is because they are necessarily guided by prevailing concepts and theories with respect to the circumstances of the urban poor, which sometimes do the poor considerable disservice. With the additional insight provided by a decade of participation in the design of policies, programs and projects serving as a tempering influence, the author does not leap to easy criticism of prevailing views and practices. He notes that ideas and interventions change in response to new understanding, sometimes in ways that the producers of such understanding could never have imagined. The problem is that change is painfully slow, and in desperately poor countries like Haiti, waiting for change exacts an almost intolerable price from the poor. This book is a provocative yet highly original contribution which will require serious attention from scholars and practitioners of development. Appearing as it does soon after the great seaward exodus of Haitians and urban unrest culminating in the flight of the Duvalier family, this timely volume will provide illumination for those seeking to understand the circumstances that press people to risk all in the name of survival.

The COVID-19 pandemic has, with alarming speed, dealt a heavy blow to an already-weak global economy, which is expected to slide into its deepest recession since the second world war, despite unprecedented policy support. The global recession would be deeper if countries take longer to bring the pandemic under control, if financial stress triggers defaults, or if there are protracted effects on households and firms. Economic disruptions are likely to be more severe and protracted in emerging market and developing economies with larger domestic outbreaks and weaker medical care systems; greater exposure to international spillovers through trade, tourism, and commodity and financial markets; weaker macroeconomic frameworks; and more pervasive informality and poverty. Beyond the current steep economic contraction, the pandemic is likely to leave lasting scars on the global economy by undermining consumer and investor confidence, human capital, and global value chains. Being mostly a reflection of the recent plunge in global energy demand, low oil prices are unlikely to provide much of a boost to global growth in the near term. While policymakers' immediate priorities are to address the health crisis and moderate the short-term economic losses, the likely long-term consequences of the pandemic highlight the need to forcefully undertake comprehensive reform programs to improve the fundamental drivers of economic growth, once the crisis abates. Global Economic Prospects is a World Bank Group Flagship Report that examines global economic developments and prospects, with a special focus on emerging market and developing economies, on a semiannual basis (in January and June). The January edition includes in-depth analyses of topical policy challenges faced by these economies, while the June edition contains shorter analytical pieces.

Democratic Insecurities focuses on the ethics of military and humanitarian intervention in Haiti during and after Haiti's 1991 coup. In this remarkable ethnography of violence, Erica Caple James explores the traumas of Haitian victims whose experiences were denied by U.S. officials and recognized only selectively by other humanitarian providers. Using vivid first-person accounts from women survivors, James raises important new questions about humanitarian aid, structural violence, and political insecurity. She discusses the politics of postconflict assistance to Haiti and the challenges of promoting democracy, human rights, and justice in societies that experience chronic insecurity. Similarly, she finds that efforts to promote political development and psychosocial rehabilitation may fail because of competition, strife, and corruption among the individuals and institutions that implement such initiatives.

Haiti, one of the least developed and most vulnerable nations in the Western Hemisphere, made the international headlines in January 2010 when an earthquake destroyed the capital, Port-au-Prince. More than a year later, little reconstruction has taken place, in spite of a strong international funding commitment. Mats Lundahl has written several seminal works on Haiti, and this volume brings together the best of his past work on Haiti’s economic and political history, along with a comprehensive introduction and two new chapters which bring the story right up to the present day. Together, the volume provides both historical background and explanation as to why Haiti was so badly affected by the earthquake, and to why reconstruction efforts have been ineffective this far. Lundahl argues that the two main causes can found in the interaction between the growth of the population and the destruction of the arable soil on the one hand, and in the creation of a predatory state during the nineteenth century, which still exists to this day. This book provides a comprehensive analysis, which charts these themes from the time of the arrival of Columbus in the island in 1492, to the present day. The book also deals with contemporary market and policy failures, as well as the crucial recent elections, and considers the path ahead for this impoverished nation. This book will be of huge relevance and interest not only to students and researchers in economic history, but also for all those working on development economics, development studies and American and Caribbean Studies more generally.

Toussaint L’Ouverture was the leader of the Haitian Revolution in the late eighteenth century, in which slaves rebelled against their masters and established the first black republic. In this collection of his writings and speeches, former Haitian politician Jean-Bertrand Aristide demonstrates L’Ouverture’s profound contribution to the struggle for equality.