On the eve of the World Bank evaluation, the Dominican Republic exhibits macroeconomic strength, but suffers from structural shortcomings in education, skills, and job quality, which limit the sustainability of growth and hinder the expansion of the real estate market
SANTO DOMINGO. – The Dominican Republic is entering the final phase of the World Bank's 2022–2026 Country Partnership Framework, whose closure in June 2026 will give way to the results evaluation process, Completion and Learning Review, and the design of a new country strategy.
More than an administrative closure, this moment demands a structural reading that helps to understand the extent to which recent economic growth has been accompanied by transformations in the foundations of development.
The macroeconomic balance is well known: a solid and sustained rate of expansion during the period, with relative price stability, dynamism in tourism and resilience to external shocks.
However, the Alliance Framework itself warned that the country's challenge was not to grow, but to transform that growth into inclusive and sustainable development.
Four years later, the available indicators show limited progress towards that goal, especially in the human capital component.
The results of the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA 2022) are particularly telling. In mathematics, only 8% of Dominican students reach the minimum proficiency level; in reading, 25% do so, and in science, 23%. In OECD countries, these proportions average around 74% and 76% in reading and science, respectively.
The gap is not marginal, since it implies that between three-quarters and more than 90% of students in the Dominican Republic do not acquire the basic skills necessary to integrate productively into the economy.
This lag is not due to a problem of access, but of quality. The country has expanded educational coverage and increased public spending in the sector (4% of GDP), but learning outcomes have not kept pace with this effort.
In economic terms, this translates into an insufficient accumulation of effective human capital, that is, skills that increase productivity.
This limitation is compounded by a mismatch between education and the productive structure. Data from the Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology show that only about 17% of university enrollment is concentrated in STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—while more than 80% is geared towards non-technical careers, mainly administration, law, and education.
Within technical fields, the scale is also limited: around 43,000 students in engineering and industry, 39,000 in information technology, and about 3,500 in basic sciences.
The result is a persistent mismatch between the supply and demand for skills. Dynamic sectors of the economy face constraints in finding technical professionals, while a significant proportion of graduates find employment in low-productivity jobs or outside their field of study.
Therefore, this is not a deficit of education in quantitative terms, but rather a deficit of relevance.
This gap is clearly evident in the labor market. According to the National Statistics Office and the Central Bank of the Dominican Republic, informal employment remains at around 55%-60% of total employment, with levels exceeding 70% in lower-income segments.
The OECD has documented that approximately 65% of informal workers are self-employed and about 29% are wage earners without social protection.
The economic implications are direct. High levels of informality reflect and, at the same time, perpetuate low levels of productivity, unstable incomes, and limited social security coverage, while also restricting the tax base and limiting the State's ability to finance broader public policies.
Essentially, the labor market acts as the channel through which human capital deficiencies translate into aggregate economic outcomes. Impact on the real estate market
The link with the real estate sector is immediate, although not always explicit.
Informality limits households' ability to demonstrate income and access banking or mortgage financing, reducing the effective demand for formal housing. At the same time, low-quality employment restricts the expansion of a middle class with sustained purchasing power, which limits the depth and sophistication of the market.
In this context, economic growth does not fully translate into increased access to housing or more structured urban development.
If we compare the current situation with the starting point of the Partnership Framework in 2022, the pattern is clear: the economy has maintained its dynamism, but the structural indicators of human capital, educational quality, relevance of training and labor informality do not show substantial changes.
In this area, there has been no breakthrough that would allow us to speak of transformation.
Looking ahead to the end of the cycle and the World Bank's evaluation, the country shows clear strengths in macroeconomic stability and growth, but lags behind in the component that defines the sustainability of that growth over time.
Human capital thus emerges as the main point of tension between economic performance and development.
The data suggest that the main limitation lies not in growth itself, but in its quality: through June, and as the cycle draws to a close, no substantial changes are anticipated in the structural indicators. The challenge remains in terms of public policy: improving learning outcomes, aligning training with the demands of the productive sector, and raising the quality of employment.
In the absence of progress on these fronts, the growth potential of the economy and, by extension, of the real estate market, will continue to be conditioned by structural limitations, in line with the diagnoses of the World Bank.
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