The Dominican Republic faces a timely opportunity to harness and pivot towards a more competitive, inclusive, and resilient economic trajectory. To fully seize this opportunity, the country’s unique selling proposition should be more strongly based on substantive and sustainable competitive advantages. However, the domestic private sector continues to face constraints that undermine investment efforts and long-term competitiveness, including regulatory complexity and institutional fragmentation, leading to an opaque business environment, a lack of workers with the needed skills, and high costs of energy.
This Country Private Sector Diagnostic (CPSD) comes at a crucial time in the country’s push to strengthen private sector opportunities to assist with this pivot. This report identifies ways to reduce cross-cutting constraints to private investment, with a focus on making three sectors more competitive: one tradable sector (MedTech), one domestic sector (Real estate; with a focus on Eco-industrial parks), and one enabling sector (Agri-logistics). In the MedTech sector, the country has an opportunity to support growth in high value-added manufacturing sectors (which are also leading employers of women), while helping to develop backward linkages, and scale a new growth paradigm that is more inclusive of local SMEs and local talent. In Eco-industrial parks, ripe opportunities exist for developments that can improve access to the next generation of serviced industrial land. And in Agri-logistics, investments and reforms can promote climate-smart agriculture, while also providing a blueprint of how logistics, more broadly, can better leverage the geographic position of the DR to promote higher value-added exports.