Linguistic Capture: Diaspora Leverage and Property Rights in Haiti

This dataset supports research exploring the concept of "Linguistic Capture: Diaspora Leverage and Property Rights in Haiti," offering a comprehensive analysis of property rights trajectories in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, alongside related economic and human rights data. The repository includes the Intellectual Property Rights Index (IPRI) scores from 2007 to 2025 for both nations, detailed Haitian remittance data up to 2023, and a Jupyter Notebook documenting the analytical methodology.

The analysis highlights a critical divergence in property rights enforcement and protection. Haiti's IPRI score demonstrated a severe decline from 3.40 in 2013 to a projected 0.72 in 2025, representing a 78.8% drop and ranking Haiti as the 2nd lowest globally out of 126 countries in 2025. Concurrently, the Dominican Republic experienced a sharp decline in its IPRI score, plummeting from 6.50 in 2021 to 4.51 in 2022. This significant deterioration in the Dominican Republic's property rights environment, as reflected by the IPRI score, aligns with critical human rights concerns detailed in the "Dominican Republic 2021 Human Rights Report." The report specifically documents the systemic denial of property ownership rights for stateless persons of Haitian descent, a population retroactively stripped of Dominican citizenship, suggesting a direct link between these discriminatory practices and the observed decline in the IPRI score for the Dominican Republic.

Further, the dataset underscores the profound economic reliance of Haiti on remittances, which reached $3.90 billion in 2023, amounting to 156% of the government's budget. A game theory analysis quantifies a substantial incentive for reform, demonstrating a payoff differential of approximately $4.75 billion (190% of the budget) favoring property rights protection over the perpetuation of elite rents. This collection is an invaluable resource for researchers, policymakers, economists, and human rights advocates focusing on property rights, development economics, human rights, and the complex sociopolitical dynamics of the Caribbean region.

Keywords and subjects Haiti, Dominican Republic, property rights, IPRI, remittances, linguistic capture, diaspora, development, human rights, economic development, Caribbean, statelessness, governance, rule of law

Licenses Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

Creators The Authors (as already specified)

Publication date 2025-12-01