The Dominican Republic keeps breaking its own FDI record. The copyable part isn't the number.

On 7 July, ProDominicana opened the Americas Investment Forum in Santo Domingo with a headline it has earned the right to repeat: the Dominican Republic pulled in US$5.03bn of foreign direct investment in 2025, an 11.3% rise on 2024, two-thirds above its 2019 level, and a fourth consecutive record. The first quarter of 2026 kept the run going at US$1.67bn, up 16% year on year. Ricardo Hausmann flew in from Harvard's Growth Lab to talk regional competitiveness. Eleven multinationals collected awards. It was a good day for a small economy that has spent a decade quietly out-recruiting larger neighbours.

The easy story is the postcard one — beaches, proximity to the US, a stable peso. But an agency in Nairobi or Bogota or Tashkent cannot import the coastline, and copying it would be pointless anyway. What is worth copying is the apparatus behind the number, and ProDominicana has built more of it than most of its peers. Its Single Window for Investment routes 41 separate procedures across 26 public institutions through one channel, so an investor is not left to assemble permits agency by agency. Its investment guide is published in ten languages, which is less a courtesy than a demand-generation tool. And between 2020 and 2026 the agency can state, precisely, that it assisted 8,146 investors, worked 11,550 leads, and directly accompanied 339 major projects to ground.

That last sentence is the one to sit with. Most promotion agencies can quote the deals they cut the ribbon on; far fewer can tell you how many leads entered the top of the funnel, how many became accompanied projects, and what the conversion rate between the two actually is. ProDominicana treats promotion as a measured pipeline rather than a series of announcements, and that discipline — not the weather — is what compounds into a fourth straight record. You cannot improve a funnel you do not instrument.

The second thing worth stealing is where the growth is coming from. Industry minister Eduardo Sanz Lovaton made the point plainly at the forum: beyond the first cheque, the foreign firms already in the country keep reinvesting and expanding. That is the Costa Rica lesson — most FDI comes from companies you have already won — applied with intent. Reinvestment is cheaper to land than a greenfield entrant, it signals confidence to the next prospect, and it rewards aftercare teams rather than marketing budgets. An agency that organises around retention and expansion is fishing in a stocked pond.

None of which means the model is without strain, and the honest reading is where the practitioner value sits. Look at the composition of that US$5bn: tourism took 26.3%, energy 23.8% and real estate 15.7% — roughly two-thirds of the capital in three sectors that are, broadly, domestic-facing. Free zones drew just 8.7% of the FDI dollars. Yet the free-zone regime is what carries the tradable economy: more than 200,000 direct jobs across 28 provinces, women more than half the workforce, and around US$8.6bn of exports in 2024 — over 60% of the country's total. In other words, the sectors that attract the most capital are not the ones building the diversified, job-dense, export economy. That gap is not a Dominican failing so much as a universal one, and naming it is the job.

So the lesson cuts two ways. The machinery — the working single window, the multilingual front door, the measured funnel, the reinvestment-first pipeline, and the 2025-2036 plan that signals it will all still be there next administration — is genuinely transferable, and an agency anywhere can start building it on Monday. But the composition warning travels too: a promotion story optimised for the biggest dollar figures and a development story optimised for jobs and exports can quietly drift apart, and the agencies that thrive are the ones that decide, on purpose, which one they are actually running.