The value of complementing each other

Latin America and the Caribbean have much to offer the world and even more to gain when their capabilities are connected. Our productive diversity, our natural resources, our talents, and our geographic location offer us an extraordinary opportunity: to complement each other better and expand what we can achieve together.

This complementarity can become a real advantage. It means connecting markets, developing regional value chains, combining productive capacities, and creating the conditions to attract more investment. It also means strengthening, from a more integrated region, our ties with key partners such as the United States and Europe.

The Dominican Republic has learned that opportunities grow when we are able to connect strengths. Collaboration between the public and private sectors has been an important part of that journey and offers a valuable experience for thinking on a regional scale.

Today, intraregional trade, according to ECLAC data, represents only about 14% of total trade in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Rather than dwelling on this figure, we should see it as a measure of the room we have to move forward: facilitating trade, improving our physical and digital connectivity, attracting investment, and developing regional value chains.

A better-integrated region will also have a greater capacity to engage with the United States, Europe, and other centers of the global economy. Greater integration and better global connectivity are complementary objectives.

This articulation needs a fundamental piece: an increasingly close relationship between the public and private sectors.

Governments build frameworks of stability, open markets, forge agreements, and create favorable conditions. Businesses contribute investment, innovation, knowledge, and execution capabilities. When both sectors work toward shared goals, opportunities are more likely to translate into positive outcomes.

The Dominican Republic understands the value of this collaboration. Our experience in free trade zones, tourism, logistics, digital transformation, and investment attraction demonstrates what can be achieved when we combine stability, competitive advantages, policy continuity, and collaboration between the government and the business sector.

The results allow us to measure that confidence. In 2025, foreign direct investment exceeded US$5 billion for the first time, reaching an all-time high.

Capital seeks opportunities, but also predictability, clear rules, and above all, trust. When a company decides to invest, expand its operations, or establish itself in a country, it is expressing, through its resources, an expectation about its future.

And that confidence comes from both sides of the Atlantic. In 2025, Spain was the leading source of foreign direct investment in the Dominican Republic, and our bilateral trade exceeded US$1.4 billion. These economic relationships demonstrate the value of maintaining open communication and continuing to expand connections between our markets.

For the Dominican Republic, deepening our relationship with the United States, Europe, and our own Caribbean and Central American region are complementary goals. Our strategic geographic location, air and maritime connectivity, our hardworking, young, and vibrant people, and our productive platform acquire greater value when we are able to use them to connect markets, attract investment, and create opportunities that translate into jobs and support for our people through effective public policies.

This vision also guides the Dominican Republic’s Presidency of ECLAC for the 2026-2028 period. We want to help the region move from broad consensus to concrete initiatives, actively involving governments, the private sector, and civil society to mobilize investment, strengthen security, promote innovation, and increase our productive capacities.

This requires a diplomacy that understands this new reality. Economic diplomacy in our time must understand value chains, anticipate changes, know how to connect the public and private sectors, and identify where new opportunities are emerging. Having relationships is important; knowing how to turn those relationships into opportunities is what gives them true meaning.

The upcoming Ibero-American Summit comes at a particularly opportune moment for this conversation. Geopolitical realities are showing us the value of diversifying, building resilience, and finding complementarities. Therein may lie one of our region’s greatest opportunities.

In a world undergoing reorganization, Latin America and the Caribbean have an opportunity to act with greater coordination.

Let us transform our diversity into complementarity; our complementarity into strength; and that strength into a better way of relating to the United States, Europe, and the world.