| Summary: | This public expenditure review (PER) for the Dominican Republic (DR) is designed to inform the government's fiscal expenditure policies and advance its economic and social development priorities. The PER was requested by the government in December 2019, but its scope has been extensively revised to reflect the rapid evolution of the Coronavirus disease SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) crisis. This PER finds that institutional fragmentation poses a critical challenge to economic policymaking in the DR. Inadequate coordination between public agencies undermines the effectiveness and efficiency of service delivery and reinforces the monopolistic structure of key economic sectors. These findings are consistent with the analysis presented in the previous PER, completed in 2019, which emphasized the importance of efficiency gains in a context of constrained revenue mobilization and limited borrowing space. Institutional fragmentation aggravates the three most pressing economic policy issues facing the DR: (i) an unsustainable debt trajectory, (ii) slow rates of job creation in the formal sector, and (iii) gaps in both the social protection system and the delivery of basic services
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