Q1 2016 preliminary results: 6.1% GDP growth and a decline in unemployment

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC - In Brief 02 May 2016 by Pavel Isa

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The Central Bank announced that economic activity starts up strongly in 2016. Official figures set GDP growth in Q1 2016 at 6.1% compared to q1 2015. Although in January the short term indicator of economic activity reflected a relatively low growth, in February and March activities picked up significantly, driving overall growth to a level above potential. However, the figure is moderately lower than the 7.1% registered in Q1 2015. Mining was the activity which recorded the highest rate of growth in the quarter (33.8%) compared to last year. This extravagant figure was due to the low level of production registered in Q1 2015 associated with the drastic decline in mining operations in the main project in the country due to technical reasons. Besides mining, finance (12.0%), health services (9.6%) and construction (8.8%) were the three best performing sectors in the period. Of these it stands out the performance of construction because of its weight in global growth and its capacity to create jobs. Other prominent sectors were tourism (hotels, bars and restaurants) with a growth rate of 6.4%, education (6.3%), and energy and water (6.2%). The Central Bank also reported improved behavior in labor market indicators. Results of the labor force survey of April 2016 indicated that the total number of jobs created since April 2015 was more than 173,000, leading to a reduction in the open unemployment rate from 6.0% to 5.7%. No figure on the performance of the rate of broad unemployment was released, which is the most relevant. However, an increase of that magnitude in the number of jobs should have reduce it as keeping it steady at 14% involves creating 100 thousand jobs per ...