As policymakers in the Dominican Republic navigate heated debates over a controversial proposed tax reform, one crucial conversation remains largely absent from the national discourse, according to regional innovation leader Jonathan Joel Mentor. The reform’s most talked-about provision centers on re-evaluating long-standing, sector-specific tax incentives that have guided decades of investment decisions, with government officials pushing for all existing tax breaks to prove their worth through measurable economic contributions. Mentor calls this scrutiny healthy and long overdue, noting that every public incentive should be held accountable to the simple standard of delivering more economic opportunity than it costs taxpayers. Yet in his view, while the government is asking the right questions about legacy incentives, it is missing a far more consequential piece of the puzzle: building the policy and structural foundation to finance the country’s next generation of economic growth.
The current public debate has been almost entirely focused on fiscal sustainability, revenue targets, and the fate of existing industry exemptions. What is missing, Mentor argues, is a serious national discussion about venture capital formation, startup enabling infrastructure, innovation investment, intellectual property protections, and the systemic changes needed to turn the Dominican Republic into a global magnet for high-growth scalable companies. This gap is not a trivial oversight, he emphasizes: governments do not generate lasting wealth on their own; they create the conditions that allow private entrepreneurs and investors to build wealth. The companies that will expand the country’s tax base 20 years from now have not even been founded yet, so policy must prioritize building the ecosystem that will nurture them today. If policymakers are willing to audit the engines of past growth, they should be equally committed to examining the engines that will drive future prosperity, he adds.
After a decade working with hundreds of entrepreneurs across the Dominican Republic, Latin America, and the Caribbean, Mentor highlights a core challenge that often goes unrecognized in policy circles. It is not a lack of entrepreneurial ambition across the country – he has met countless founders building companies across software, logistics, fintech, education, healthcare, and artificial intelligence who possess the creativity and resilience global investors seek. Instead, the gap lies in a shortage of investable companies: institutional venture funds, family offices, and development finance institutions do not invest based on raw ambition alone. They evaluate governance frameworks, scalability potential, market size, management maturity, and the likelihood of delivering venture-scale returns. The true bottleneck for Dominican innovation is not a shortage of entrepreneurs, it is a shortage of an enabling ecosystem that supports capital formation.
Mentor notes that this gap also represents a unique, underappreciated opportunity for the Dominican Republic. Comparisons to established innovation hubs like Silicon Valley or Austin are unhelpful for strategic planning, he argues; the country does not need to become a smaller copy of these regions. Instead, it has the chance to claim a position no Caribbean nation currently holds: the region’s first recognized hub for venture capital formation and innovation-driven investment. The absence of a dominant regional venture hub is not a weakness, it is an open invitation.
The Dominican Republic already holds several underutilized advantages that appeal to global investors and mobile talent, Mentor points out. It offers far greater capital efficiency than major North American startup ecosystems, sits at a strategic crossroads between North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean, and boasts a growing bilingual workforce that aligns with North American business hours. It also combines strong digital connectivity, high quality of life, and easy accessibility that is increasingly attractive in an era where top talent can live and work anywhere. Today, talent chooses where to live before choosing where to build companies, and investment follows that talent. Already, growing initiatives like the Digital Nomad Summit Santo Domingo have drawn a wave of global founders, investors, and skilled professionals to the country – talent is already arriving, even before policy has adapted to welcome it, and history shows capital rarely lags far behind, he notes.
Mentor stresses that his argument is not a rejection of tax reform, nor a defense of every legacy incentive currently under review. Instead, he calls on policymakers and national stakeholders to broaden the scope of the conversation. Fiscal policy, sustainable public finances, and tax revenues are all critically important, but they are outcomes of a growing economy, not substitutes for growing the economy. The tax reform debate will eventually wrap up, new rules will take effect, and headlines will move on, but the question of how to build the foundation for future growth will remain. In a decade, will the Dominican Republic be known as a country that optimized its tax code to incrementally boost government revenue, or as a country that built the Caribbean’s leading venture capital hub that spawned entirely new industries? One outcome manages existing economic activity; the other generates new, transformative growth. That difference will shape where the next generation of Caribbean wealth is created, and the question of how to pursue that future is far too important to leave out of the national conversation.