By Daniel Diaz MPA/ID 2027
Punta Cana is known as a leading tourism destination, but its economic future may lie in diversification.
During his summer internship at the Punta Cana Free Trade Zone, Daniel Diaz MPA/ID 2027 explored how private investment and infrastructure could support higher-value industries and regional development. In this personal reflection, Diaz shares what he learned from his experience.
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When you imagine a paradise destination for a vacation, Punta Cana is probably one of the first places that comes to mind. This region of the Dominican Republic is widely known for its well-developed tourism industry. In 2025, Punta Cana accounted for nearly 72 percent (5.28 million) of all foreign tourist arrivals to the country.1
Only 50 years ago, Punta Cana was a largely undeveloped area. Have you ever wondered how this transformation happened and who made it possible? Grupo Puntacana led major private investments to develop the tourism sector, ranging from resorts to the world’s first privately owned international airport. These investments gradually transformed an isolated coastal region into one of the Caribbean’s leading tourism destinations and an important economic center for the Dominican Republic.
The COVID-19 pandemic, however, exposed Punta Cana’s extreme dependence on tourism. So, what can be done differently? Is it possible for Punta Cana to transform its economic structure again over the next 20 years by moving toward higher-skilled and more complex activities? These questions were at the center of my summer internship at the Punta Cana Free Trade Zone (PCFTZ), a new airport free trade zone developed by Grupo Puntacana.
“This internship showed me how private investment, infrastructure, and public policy can work together to promote structural transformation and regional development.”
My work focused on understanding how a private free trade zone could contribute to broader public objectives, including productive diversification, the creation of higher-value jobs, export growth, and the attraction of new industries to the Dominican Republic. In practice, the company is pursuing a private sector-led industrial policy by leveraging its more than 900 weekly flights to more than 85 cities in 25 countries. PFCTZ plans to evolve into a mature, high-value logistics and manufacturing ecosystem in the Caribbean, including high-skill services such as maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO).
During my summer internship, I developed two main projects for presentation to the company’s board, contributing to strategic discussions about how Punta Cana could diversify beyond tourism and develop a more complex and productive economy. The first project benchmarked PCFTZ against comparable international clusters and identified its main competitiveness gaps and binding constraints. The second project applied economic complexity and global value chain frameworks to identify the sectors most likely to succeed within Punta Cana’s emerging productive ecosystem.
In a nutshell, this internship showed me how private investment, infrastructure, and public policy can work together to promote structural transformation and regional development.
Images courtesy of Daniel Diaz MPA/ID 2027. Diaz received a summer internship grant from the Mossavar-Rahmani Center For Business and Government (M-RCBG) to help support his experience.
1 Banco Central de la República Dominicana (2026). Informe del flujo turístico: Enero-diciembre 2025. https://cdn.bancentral.gov.do/documents/publicaciones-economicas/informe-del-flujo-turistico/documents/informe_turistico2025-12.pdf
