ABSTRACT

During the past few years, two excellent little books by Georges Anglade (1974, 1977), which deal with the economic geography of Haiti, written for use in Haitian schools, have appeared. These books constitute the only attempt to date to summarize and synthesize some of the information regarding the spatial features of Haiti’s economy. This is a non-satisfactory state of affairs, for however excellent and useful Anglade’s books may be (and they very definitely are), the fact that they are schoolbooks necessarily puts a limit to the type of material which can be presented. Thus, the spatial dimension of the Haitian economy remains one of the least known. So far, little systematic research on spatial and regional problems has seen the light of day. This is not, of course, to say that no information on the regional dimension exists, but that the problem is that this information is hopelessly scattered in an enormous number of documents which are in turn scattered themselves among a host of official and unofficial organizations and libraries inside and outside Haiti.