Spanish
The Secretary of Finances of the Fuerza del Pueblo (FP) party and former Minister of Finance of the Dominican Republic, Daniel Toribio, warned that the employment growth registered in the country during the first quarter of 2026 continues to be mostly sustained by informality, while questioning the figures presented by the Central Bank on the supposed formalization of the labor market.
Through a press release, Toribio pointed out that, although the official report highlights an increase in employment, the data reflects a different reality when analyzing the quality of the jobs generated and the weight that informal employment continues to have within the Dominican economy.
"The headline may sound positive, but the problem lies in the quality of employment and the lack of verification of the so-called formality," said the political leader and economist.
Toribio explained that, of the total jobs created in the analyzed period, less than 21 thousand were classified as formal, while more than 98 thousand corresponded to the informal sector, which shows, in his opinion, that a large part of the labor growth continues to occur outside the mechanisms of contribution and social protection.
The former official also recalled that labor informality remains at 54.1% of the labor market, a situation that implies that millions of workers carry out their activities without access to pensions, social security or job stability.
In that sense, he maintained that there is a fundamental question that the Government has yet to answer: how many of the new formal jobs truly correspond to the private sector and how many come from the expansion of the public payroll.
"If most of the new formal jobs come from the State, then there is no real formalization of the national productive apparatus, but simply a growth of public employment," he indicated.
Daniel Toribio also considered that presenting the aggregated employment figures as a "labor success" constitutes a propagandistic narrative that does not reflect the structural difficulties of the Dominican labor market.
The leader of the Fuerza del Pueblo stated that the national goal should not be limited to increasing the number of employed people, but rather to generate more private jobs with productivity, stability, contributions, and sufficient salaries to improve the quality of life of the population.
