Leonel Fernández calls for end to bureaucracy delaying US$20 billion in investments

During a recent closed-door roundtable with industry stakeholders representing La Altagracia province’s productive and commercial sectors, former Dominican Republic President Leonel Fernández sounded a urgent alarm over crippling bureaucratic red tape that has frozen nearly $20 billion in planned real estate and tourism development projects across the country for half a decade.
Fernández, whose political and economic policy track record is closely tied to the Dominican Republic’s decades-long expansion of its high-value tourism sector, framed the permitting backlog as a self-inflicted drag on core national economic priorities. He noted that the construction industry has long served as one of the country’s most reliable employment generators and GDP growth pillars, creating ripple benefits for local manufacturing, small business, and household income across every region. The multi-year delays in processing construction and land use approvals, he argued, are not just delaying individual building projects, but eroding investor confidence, blocking tens of thousands of potential formal jobs, and dragging down projected annual economic growth rates.
The former president singled out La Altagracia’s world-famous Punta Cana tourism corridor as the area most acutely impacted by the administrative bottlenecks. As the country’s top revenue-generating tourism hub, Punta Cana has drawn sustained global investor interest for new resort developments, luxury residential communities, and supporting hospitality infrastructure, but the current slow permitting framework is preventing those planned projects from breaking ground. Fernández urged relevant national and provincial regulatory bodies to implement targeted streamlining measures for high-priority development projects, warning that prolonged inaction would push potential investment capital to competing Caribbean tourism destinations instead.
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