The Dominican Republic Booked a Fourth Straight FDI Record

ProDominicana opened the Americas Investment Forum in Santo Domingo on July 7 with a number it has earned the right to repeat. The Dominican Republic took in US$5.03bn of foreign direct investment in 2025, up 11.3% on 2024 and two-thirds above its 2019 level, a fourth consecutive record. The first quarter of 2026 ran at US$1.67bn, up 16% year on year. Ricardo Hausmann came in from Harvard's Growth Lab to talk competitiveness, and eleven multinationals collected awards. That is not a bad morning for a small economy that has spent a decade out-recruiting larger neighbors.

Credit for this usually goes to geography: the beaches, the proximity to Miami, the stable peso. An agency in Nairobi or Bogota or Tashkent cannot import any of that. What ProDominicana has built is duller and portable. Its single window for investment routes 41 separate procedures across 26 public institutions through one channel, so an investor is not left assembling permits agency by agency. Its investment guide runs in ten languages. And for the period 2020 to 2026 the agency can say that it assisted 8,146 investors, worked 11,550 leads and accompanied 339 major projects to ground.

Most agencies can list the deals they cut ribbons on. Far fewer can tell you how many leads entered the funnel, how many converted into accompanied projects, and what the rate between them was. ProDominicana runs promotion as a measured pipeline. That is a management choice, and it is available to any agency willing to log its leads.

The second habit worth copying is where the growth comes from. Industry minister Eduardo Sanz Lovaton told the forum that the foreign firms already in the country keep reinvesting and expanding well beyond their first check. Most of next year's FDI, in the Dominican Republic as almost everywhere, will come from companies an agency has already won. Expansions are cheaper to land than greenfield entrants and they close faster, which argues for putting retention staff where the marketing budget currently sits.

A headline FDI figure counts the capital that arrived. It says nothing about what that capital builds, and in the Dominican case those two answers point in different directions. Tourism took 26.3% of 2025 inflows and real estate another 15.7%. More than 40% of the money went into hotels, resorts and property. Those are real assets that earn real returns, but they serve the domestic market and the resort enclave, and you cannot export them. Energy took 23.8%, which is enabling infrastructure and counts for a good deal more. The free zones took 8.7%. Yet the free zones are the tradable economy (medical devices, electronics, global services), carrying more than 200,000 direct jobs across 28 provinces and roughly US$8.6bn of exports in 2024, over 60% of everything the country sells abroad. The sector doing the most to upgrade the economy is attracting the least of the capital.

This is the default gravity of FDI everywhere, because property and resort deals are large, easy to book and photogenic in an annual total. A US$40m medical-device plant that hires 900 people and exports all of its output will lose the headline to a US$300m hotel every time. The danger is that the headline starts steering the agency: if the number you are judged on is dollars, you will drift toward the deals that move dollars and away from the smaller, harder wins that deepen an economy. The defense is to publish more than one number: report the dollars, but report the jobs, the exports and the wage levels that came with them, and be explicit about which of those the strategy is trying to maximize.