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Notes -
Not an expert on this issue, but my impression is that conditions there were exacerbated by
neighboring slaveholding nations discouraging trade with them in the decades after the revolution -- a de facto embargo being especially hard on an island nation.
huge reparations they had to pay to France under threat of military attack, which were such a large fraction (or perhaps initially, multiple) of their economic output for so long that successive governments could only focus on extracting enough wealth from the populace to service the debt
early lack of economic development and limited trade led to low-tech dependence on burning wood for fuel, which in turn led to extensive deforestation, erosion, and desertification of the productive lands. Supposedly neighboring DR avoided a corresponding environmental catastrophe during the mid 20th century by having a stronger central government that could, for instance, execute illegal loggers in their territory (while outsourcing their supply of illegally-logged fuel to Haiti).
Don't know if any of these fully explain the difference from majority-black baseline, but the onerous debt -- which they kept having to pay into the 20th century to US investors who eventually purchased it from France -- may have contributed to setting them off on the wrong foot institutionally.
I wonder if a communist takeover in the 1950s would have been a net gain for Haiti. They could've defaulted on their debt while at the same time receiving both education and development aid from the USSR.
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