Historian Bernardo Vega, a former Dominican ambassador to Washington and Central Bank governor, wrote in Monday?s El Caribe about how the Dominican Republic must now be referred to as the ?new? Dominican Republic. He says that in recent years, the DR has performed a complete turnaround, both economically and socially. He supports this claim by explaining that 60% of the population now lives in cities. Other indicators include the fact that the Dominican economy has become service-based and that tourism, electricity, water, commerce, transport, communications, banking, insurance, real estate rentals and government make up 64% of the GDP. Farming, which provided the nation?s money crops 40 years ago, now accounts for only 5% of the economy.
Tourism is still the most important sector, with its weight having gone from 6% of the GDP ten years ago to 18% in 2003.
He continues: ?The sectors of the economy that grow the most ? tourism, free zones and remittances ? are precisely those that have the least to do with the government.?
Evidence of this is in the 400,000 public employees thaccount for only 4% of the GDP. For every ten government employees during the reign of Balaguer (until 1996), we now have seven employed in free zones. ?We represent an economy in which absent Dominicans send us dollars, and those here send them abroad,? he writes.
On the downside, he comments: ?We have an economy that this year, together with Haiti, will be the only two not to grow in Latin America.?
He also mentions the prevalence of the ?old Dominican Republic.? Vega writes that, politically, we have not advanced. He said that the Chamber of Deputies continues to represent the old Dominican Republic, as the farmers of yesterday.
He comments on the contradictions in Dominican society. ?As a society, we have not been able to bring to justice the bankers, who are all inter-related, and who took the money of their depositors to lend to their own money-losing companies. In so doing, businesspeople in the new Dominican Republic have sunk the country into the past.?
In his survey of the current status quo, Vega says that we have reinstated re-election, expanded the government payrolls and taken on medium-term debts at commercial rates with private banking to import items that are not priority and are excessively priced ? all so that a very few could earn a lot.
?Now, we have gotten into sovereign bonds and in only two years could not come up with the money to pay the interest rates. Our health and education indexes are the worst in the Caribbean islands, with the sole exception of Haiti. With the Cold War over, we have increased our military expenditures.?
He urged the political sector to advance and become part of the new Dominican Republic. The lack of such continues to be the principal obstacle to progress, according to Vega. ?With politicians of yesterday, of the old country, we will not progress. We all hope that as of today, 16 August, our political country may be part of the new Dominican Republic.?