The population of the Dominican Republic in 2017 was 10,678,074 people, with the majority living in urban areas. The economy of the Dominican Republic is largely based on services and industry, with a GDP of $77.1 billion and a relatively high per capita income. The Dominican Republic is a member of the United Nations, Caribbean Community (CARICOM), Organization of American States (OAS), International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. It has close ties to many countries throughout Latin America as well as the United States and Canada. In terms of politics, it is a unitary presidential republic with President Danilo Medina as its head of state. The Prime Minister is Roosevelt Skerrit who leads the Dominican Liberation Party which has been in power since 2004. See militarynous for Dominican Republic military and defense.
Yearbook 2017
Dominican Republic. According to Countryaah.com, Danilo Medina, recently the most popular president of Latin America, was persecuted during the year by the corruption scandal surrounding Brazilian construction company Odebrecht. Big bribes to a total sum of $ 92 million from Odebrecht and procurement of heavily overvalued construction projects between 2001 and 2014 were linked to Medina’s ruling party PLD (the Dominican Liberation Party), among others. During the year, the organization Marcha Verde organized no less than five major nationwide protest marches – an unusual phenomenon in the Dominican Republic – against widespread corruption, including a manifestation outside Odebrecht’s office in Santo Domingo where participants demanded that the company be thrown out of the country. The movement culminated in a manifesto, signed by several of the country’s leading intellectuals and activists and published in June, which called for Medina’s departure. However, the President of the Election Commission rejected the idea of new elections as incompatible with the Constitution.
Neither did Medina himself passive on the matter. Even before the manifesto was published in June, a law on penalties for money laundering and corruption was issued to a minimum sentence of ten years in prison. Shortly before, the state prosecutor had announced that he was going to prosecute 14 people, among them several former ministers and senators, for various bribery, and several of the defendants were arrested or placed in house arrest. However, the opposition could not raise the vote very much in the accusations as several of the bribery crimes were committed during the time of the largest opposition party PRD (Dominican Revolutionary Party) ruling the country, especially in 2000–04 when Hipólito Mejía was president. See ABBREVIATIONFINDER for frequently used acronyms and abbreviations related to as well as country profile of Dominican Republic.