Assessing the Dominican Republic's economic development, 1970–2020

José R. Sánchez-Fung

Chapter 19 in The Elgar Companion to the Economies of Latin America and the Caribbean, 2025, pp 391-415 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: The paper reviews the Dominican Republic's economic development trajectory between 1970 and 2020. The economy diversified from the 1970s by shifting from agriculture to higher value-added activities—including export processing zones—alongside efforts to preserve macroeconomic stability and the natural environment. Empirical time series econometric modelling contributes to understanding the determinants of economic growth during this period. But the structural transformation process—alongside opening-up to global trade—met with limited success. The chapter constructs a family of Lorenz curves using time series from UNU-WIDER's World Income Inequality Database encompassing the period 1970–2020. The Lorenz curves reveal the persistence of inequality—according to the Lorenz criterion—though there is evidence of a Kuznets process with an improvement in the distribution of income in the latter part of the five-decade period. I discuss selected theoretical models with the aim of considering alternative hypotheses regarding the income-inequality association.

Keywords: Economic growth and development; Structural transformation; Trends in inequality indicators; Lorenz curves; Kuznets process; Income-inequality nexus; Dominican Republic (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035317196
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