Institutional Exclusion and Market Segmentation in Fragile States: Legal Barriers to Inclusive Development in Haiti

This dataset accompanies the study “Institutional Exclusion and the Liability of Foreignness in Fragile States: Evidence from Haiti's Legal-Commercial Infrastructure”. The research investigates how legal infrastructures in fragile, postcolonial states shape multinational enterprise (MNE) risk, inhibit market entry, and reproduce economic exclusion. Focusing on Haiti as a paradigmatic case, the study integrates critical macro-finance (CMF) and institutional theory to explain how procedural monopolies, linguistic inaccessibility, inheritance-based property fragmentation, and symbolic legal exclusion increase the liability of foreignness, constrain credit intermediation, and suppress diaspora capital. The dataset includes: Cross-national indicators for CARIFORUM countries including V-Dem polyarchy and liberal democracy indices, IPRI property rights scores, and Doing Business metrics. Descriptive statistics with z-scores comparing Haiti to regional means. Python replication code for PCA, hierarchical clustering, and panel regressions. PanelOLS regression outputs linking institutional quality to democracy outcomes (R² values ranging from 0.34 to 0.50). FAIR-compliant structure designed for open replication and validation. The findings challenge the assumption that institutional voids are defined by an absence of rules. Instead, the study shows that it is the stratified, symbolically inaccessible structure of legal systems that undermines development and increases operational risk for both domestic and foreign actors.