The manufacturing sector in the Dominican Republic is pinning its hopes on public-private synergies to re-launch industry in the country.
The DR’s Association of Industries president Ligia Bonetti drove home the reality that come 2015 all goods made in the United States would enter the DR tax-free under the DR-CAFTA agreement. Speaking at the Second Follow-up Forum to the II Industrial Congress yesterday, Tuesday 11 February, the spokesperson for the AIRD urged the DR to get its act together behind goods and services “Made in Dominican Republic.”
“We have spent decades discussing the formulas for development. We have failed to notice that the resources are right there under our noses. We have been distracted by trying to make rich people less rich, and all we have achieved is to make the poor poorer,” she said. That distraction has opened up doors for outsiders to come in and take the very things that we have not been able to make the most of, she stated.
She added that globalization has created new paradigms. “Now more than ever it is necessary to generate production and jobs, where market economics, economic and trade integration, macroeconomic stability, fiscal responsibility and improvements in the regulatory framework to ensure sustainable growth prevail so as to stimulate innovation, investment, wealth, jobs and social cohesion,” she told the audience.
“That is why it is important to insist on ways of stimulating growth based on export of goods and services with greater diversity and value added,” said Bonetti. This would then result in increased generation of hard currency and less pressure on the balance of payment, she explained.
The II Congress for Industries set the goals of doubling exports from 2012 to 2017 to US$11 billion, creating 300,000 new jobs in manufacturing, increasing the number of industries in operation to 10,000 or 28% more, increasing number of manufacturing companies that export more than US$1 million a year from 209 to 500 by 2017.
On the occasion of yesterday’s Congress of Industries, the government also announced changes to the Competitiveness and Industrial Innovation Law (392-07), Border Promotion Law 28-1 and Industrial Free Zone Law 8-90 that will be sent to Congress.
www.portalindustrial.net/index.php/novedades/declaraciones-de-prensa/204-aird-manifiesta-necesidad-de-alianza-con-el-estado
Read the full speech by Ligia Bonetti at http://informa-rse.blogspot.com/2014/02/industria-trabajar-juntos-es-el-exito.html