In his accountability speech, President Luis Abinader stressed yesterday that part of the goals of his Government is to increase formal employment to 50% and exceed 350 thousand formal medium and small businesses in the next two years.
In his speech, the president pointed out that to achieve these goals they will make formality easier than informality in the country.
He recalled that only in 2025 was a 20% increase in the minimum wage of the non-sectorized private sector achieved, which impacted 1.4 million workers.
“According to the Continuous National Labor Force Survey, 133,915 new jobs were created in 2025, reaching the historical figure of 5,139,951 employed people. This keeps the open unemployment rate at one of its historical lows of only 5.0%,” he said.
He indicated that the most important thing about this increase in employment is the progress towards the dignity of workers, since the majority of these new jobs are in the formal sector, which means that informality in employment continues to show significant decreases.
When referring to MSMEs, he announced a measure to simplify their lives, where taxes and customs fees can also be paid with debit and credit cards, which will expand the channels to comply in an agile, simple and transparent way, reducing frictions, times and costs.
They are also, he added, promoting a credit scoring model with alternative data, so that thousands of MSMEs that are today outside the financial system can build a history and access credit.
He said that for this sector, in summary, there will be more facilities, more credit, more capabilities and more formality, because when an MSME grows, a neighborhood grows, and when thousands of MSMEs are formalized, the national economy is strengthened.
About Mining
Abinader also discussed the mining sector, where he highlighted its contributions in currency and the opportunity that the country has with the exploitation of rare earths.
He said that in mining a record of more than US$2.6 billion in exports was reached in 2025, a growth of 52% compared to the previous year.
He explained that when we talk about rare earths we are talking about the most valuable mining at this time because these materials are the raw materials necessary to build new technologies.
“So far we have confirmed gross deposits of more than 150 million tons, with quality tested by the best international laboratories,” he assured.
He said that the economic income that will be obtained from the exploitation of today’s most precious mineral will be the main non-tax source of income.
