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Guest on the show Panel Magik, the Minister of Commerce and Industry, James Monazard, publicly acknowledged the absence of a real national system for measuring employment in Haiti.
“First solution, job creation. Second solution, job creation. Third solution, job creation.” The phrase is deliberately repetitive. James Monazard, Minister of Commerce and Industry, asserts it with the conviction of someone who has measured the extent of the problem. But to create jobs, one still needs to know how many exist, how many have been lost. And that is where the problem lies.
The minister has, indeed, recognized that the Haitian state does not currently have reliable and regular indicators to assess the evolution of the labor market. Neither the Bank of the Republic of Haiti (BRH), nor the Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF), nor even his own ministry publish consolidated statistics on the actual number of jobs created or lost in the country.In this desert of data, the textile sector can consider itself lucky. It is the only one with some figures. But even this data is not the work of the Haitian authorities. It comes from external actors, investors, or international organizations who, for their part, need to count in order to decide. The Caracol industrial park had about 16,000 jobs before 2018. Today, that number would have fallen to less than 3,000.James Monazard points to a structural cause of this disorder: the absence of institutional continuity. “The poison for the economy or development in general is instability,” he said. Repeated political crises prevent the implementation of sustainable public policies and, with them, the construction of these measurement and monitoring tools without which no serious economic strategy is possible.Faced with this deficiency, the minister says he wants to lay the foundations for an administrative structure responsible for producing reliable employment statistics. “This is the first effort to set up an administrative structure capable of generating credible data on the number of jobs, how they increase, how they decrease,” he explained. For the absence of data does not only penalize public decision-makers. It also penalizes researchers, academics, entrepreneurs, and even students. “Even university students who need to conduct research do not have access to this data,” the minister acknowledged.James Monazard is categorical on one point: the issue of employment must become central in economic and security discussions. “There is no way to solve the security problem without economic recovery and job creation.” A simple equation whose solution, however, is much less so. Especially when we are just beginning to count what we have lost.
