Same Island, Two Fates: Why Is Haiti Poor but the Dominican Republic Isn’t?

Haiti and the Dominican Republic share one island, roughly the same population, the same sun and the same storms. Yet the average Dominican now produces around six times as much as the average Haitian - and 250 years ago it was the other way around: the Haitian side was the richest colony on Earth. So what happened on this one island? 0:00 A line you can see from space 0:43 One island, two owners 1:47 The richest colony on Earth 2:57 Freedom, and the bill 4:25 Neighbours with a grudge 5:25 Two dictators 6:27 Why one side lost its forests 7:24 Today Sources • GDP per person (current US$), World Bank, 2023 • 1605 forced resettlement of western colonists (Devastaciones de Osorio) • Saint-Domingue output and population c. 1789 - L. Dubois, Avengers of the New World (2004) • The 1825 indemnity (150M francs, cut to 90M in 1838; payments and loans until 1947) and lost-growth estimate - The New York Times, "The Ransom" (2022) • Haitian unification 1822 - 1844; Dominican independence 27 Feb 1844; US occupations of Haiti (1915 - 34) and the DR (1916 - 24); Parsley Massacre (1937) • Trujillo (1930 - 61); the Duvaliers (1957 - 86) • Balaguer's 1967 logging ban; Tropical Storm Jeanne (2004) • 2010 earthquake; 2021 assassination of President Moïse; Dajabón binational market; DR border wall (from 2022) Music & sound effects: generated with ElevenLabs. Maps: © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL); terrain: AWS Terrain Tiles (Mapzen; SRTM et al.); satellite: NASA Blue Marble; Hispaniola imagery © ESA WorldCover project 2021 / Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2021) processed by ESA WorldCover consortium (CC BY 4.0). #Geography #Haiti #DominicanRepublic #History #Maps