Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies

Twinefactory
Courtesy Inter-American
Development Bank
assembly operations to more stable countries in the Caribbean,
mostly to the free zone in the neighboring Dominican Republic.
By the late 1990s, Haiti's once-thriving assembly sector was
operating at a fraction of its capacity.
Construction
It was not surprising that the demise of the assembly manufacturing
subsector would deal Haiti's construction industry as
devastating a blow as it did in the 1990s. Construction had
depended heavily on industrial structures related to assembly
manufacturing since the 1970s. It had also concentrated
heavily on extravagant houses being built in the residential
areas of Port-au-Prince and its exclusive suburb of Petionville;
these construction projects almost halted during the political
instability and economic turmoil of the 1990s. Meanwhile, the
country's disadvantaged majority continued to labor and build
their own dwellings with a mixture of raw materials, mostly
wood and palm thatch in rural areas and corrugated metal,
cardboard, or wood in urban shantytowns.
Mining
Haiti has few natural resources; they include small amounts
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