Liberalization has been among the most widely prescribed growth strategies in the developing world for three decades, and Haiti, like many of the least developed countries, has been applying it for twenty years. The condition Haitians live in now is reason enough, in Despeignes's view, to ask whether the neoliberal plan worked.

Agriculture is the test case, chosen because the sector is central to the Haitian economy, and the evaluation asks what opening trade did to farm output.

The answer is unfavourable on both counts. Trade liberalization has damaged Haitian agriculture rather than helped it, and the harm fell hardest on food crops — the portion of output that supplies income to the rural poor and underwrites food security. Nor did the anticipated offsetting gain appear: production of cash crops did not rise under liberalization either.

Domar revives an argument he found in Kliuchevsky's account of Muscovy and gives it a spare economic form. Where land is plentiful and labour scarce, land yields no rent: a hired man can walk off and farm for himself, so competition among employers pushes wages up to the value of what he produces and leaves the owner nothing.

A state that wants a class of landowners who do not work, as Russia wanted servitors able to equip themselves for war, cannot get one from market forces. Granting them exclusive title to land is not enough while peasants may still move. Only fixing labour in place ends the competition and lets the owner take everything above subsistence.

The hypothesis is stated as an incompatibility among three things, no two of which can coexist with the third. Domar concedes that government action is doing the decisive work, which leaves abundant land neither necessary nor sufficient for bondage.