# **1. INTRODUCTION**

Examining changes in poverty over time in Haiti poses severe challenges. An issue common to many developing countries is that survey data are not comparable. In Haiti, each of the three expenditure or income surveys collected in recent years (1986, 1999, and 2001) has a very different design. As a consequence, the analyses drawn on the basis of these surveys differ in the estimates of poverty incidence and trends (World Bank, 2006). The Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), designed to be comparable, are of high quality but fail to include the expenditure or income data generally used for poverty estimates.

As reliable data are lacking in order to trace poverty and vulnerability trends over time, disparate views on the part played by reforms in alleviating ex ante or ex post poverty may arise. Indeed, the basic question of what has happened poverty- and vulnerability-wise over the last decade is far from having satisfactorily been answered. Addressing this issue is a pre-requisite to improving our understanding of the underlying social and economic processes that have contributed towards changes in economic well-being in Haiti. Some nationally representative household income and expenditure surveys have helped to provide a better understanding of living standards. In 1986, monetary poverty statistics (based on stated consumption expenditure) showed that 59.6% of Haitians were under the poverty line (Pedersen and Lockwood, 2001). This situation only slightly improved in 1999, as 48.0% were then categorized as poor. In 2001, the HLCS stated that 55.6% of households lived with less than US$1 per day and 76.7% with less than US$2 per day. This survey has not been conducted again since then.

In this paper, we explore different avenues in order to assess the dynamics of poverty in Haiti. First, we use the Demographic Health Surveys (DHS) to analyze the evolution of asset-poverty over time. We also propose a simple and intuitively appealing framework to assess vulnerability to asset-poverty with these data. Second, we characterize poverty and vulnerability in Haiti based on a unique survey conducted in 2007 in rural areas. Using two-level modeling of consumption/income, we assess the impact of both observable and unobservable idiosyncratic and covariate shocks on households’ economic well-being. Third, we use a post-earthquake survey designed to provide a rapid assessment of food insecurity in Haiti in order to assess the post-earthquake dynamics of asset-poverty.

The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 gives a background concerning risks, poverty and coping strategies in Haiti. Section 3 examines the dynamics of poverty using pre-earthquake data. Section 4 provides a characterization of poverty and vulnerability in rural Haiti. In Section 5, post-earthquake distribution of household asset-wealth is in directly affected areas. The last section concludes.

# **2. BACKGROUND**

Like most developing countries, Haiti faces insidious risks and shocks, including droughts, hurricanes, earthquake and economic and health shocks. The year 2008 proved particularly arduous for Haitians, as they simultaneously had to face a sharp rise in basic 2