Caribbean Business is calling it the Integrated Economy, because integration is the administration’s core argument. There are, of course, two other legs to local development that she did not even mention: the island’s heavy local tax burden, and the even heavier burden of infrastructure dysfunction, particularly energy and water. But those we’ll leave for follow-up coverage.
Today, the story and her framing was another, and the venue mattered. The all-day ExpoComPR Summit, run by the ExpoComPR Foundation under Executive Director Iris “Chiqui” Santos, a former industrialist and senior DDEC official, drew a room weighted toward owner-operators rather than the multinational executives who usually receive this pitch.
The governor’s message to them was that the manufacturing bet is not made at their expense.
Manufacturing as the anchor
“Manufacturing is our principal bet,” the governor said, and the record of the past 18 months gives the claim more substance than it would have had at any point in the prior decade.
The architecture traces to Executive Order 2025-012, signed March 18, 2025, which created a Reshoring Task Force spanning DDEC, Invest Puerto Rico, PRIDCO, the Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration and the Science, Technology and Research Trust, and built around a One-Stop Investment Window, expanded pharmaceutical manufacturing training and sharpened Act 60 Chapter 6 incentives.
The deal flow since is real and datable.
- Eli Lilly announced in October 2025 that it would invest more than $1.2 billion to expand and modernize its Lilly del Caribe site in Carolina, a project tied to roughly 1,000 construction jobs and 100 new manufacturing positions while retaining more than 1,000 existing roles, and slated to produce orforglipron, the company’s first oral GLP-1 candidate.
- Amgen committed $650 million to its Juncos operation, where it employs about 2,300 people.
- Terumo inaugurated a $45 million medical device plant in Caguas building the ANGIO-SEAL vascular closure device, with 180 new jobs.
- Millicent Manufacturing acquired Teva’s Fajardo facility with roughly $45.5 million committed, the first new pharmaceutical operation to establish on the island in 15 years.
- PharmaEssentia formalized a $46 million biopharmaceutical investment in March 2026.
In a separate interview at the conference, Deputy DDEC Secretary Roberto Lefranc Fortuño told Caribbean Business that more such expansions and promotions are in the works, including more than one in the southern region that will include over 300,000 sq. ft. of expansion space, as well as a significant announcement coming for Canóvanas.
The governor summarized it in a slide on the aggregate: 29 completed projects with 27 companies covering reshoring, new operations and expansions, representing $2.618 billion in committed private investment, 5,069 new jobs and 16,179 new and existing jobs tied to those operations, with more than $584 million in committed payroll.
A separate slide put the leverage ratio at $13.20 of private investment mobilized for every $1 of public incentive, against $198.4 million in committed incentives.
The objection, and the DDEC’s answer
The manufacturing-first allocation has drawn steady criticism from economists and business voices who argue that manufacturing, even with its merits, is not the sector most likely to drive the island’s next expansion, and that DDEC’s attention should be distributed more evenly.
Lefranc Fortuño, who also runs PRIDCO and led DDEC operationally through the agency’s leadership turnover this spring, rejected that reading in the Caribbean Business exclusive interview.
“I beg to differ,” he said. “Puerto Rico can very much return to manufacturing growth, and in fact we’re doing that already, while also promoting and growing other sectors and industries.”
The employment series gives him partial cover. Manufacturing payrolls fell from roughly 160,000 in the mid-1990s to a floor near 73,900 in 2020, then recovered to about 84,000 by 2024, a level that has broadly held. The rebound is genuine, but what the series does not yet show is the likelihood of a return to the sector’s historical scale, and monthly readings have been essentially flat, which is why the critique persists.
Invest Puerto Rico has argued that automation means advanced manufacturing plants generate fewer but higher-paid positions, a defense that concedes the headcount point while contesting its significance.
The governor’s own numbers reflect the tension: private-sector wages at $18.00 an hour and up 2.2%, manufacturing wages at $15.00 an hour and up 1.4%. The Purchasing Managers Index averaged 51.3 points, above the expansion threshold in seven of the past 12 months.
Tourism as the demand engine
The second leg runs through the Puerto Rico Tourism Company and Discover Puerto Rico, and here the island is working from strength.
Foundation for Puerto Rico’s 2025 Visitor Economy Performance Model counted 5.3 million non-resident overnight visitors in 2024 spending an estimated $7.1 billion directly, projected to reach $7.8 billion in 2025.
With indirect and induced activity, total visitor-related spending exceeded $15 billion and supported more than 115,000 jobs. Average daily rates at endorsed hotels more than doubled over the decade, from $152 in 2016 to $308 in 2024, while the non-resident share of those rooms rose from 68% to 76%.
Puerto Rico closed 2025 with more than 6.8 million arrivals at Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport, up 3% over 2024, and was named Partner Country for FITUR 2027 in Madrid, the top institutional slot at the fair.
The governor valued that designation at more than $17 million in projected media exposure and put the economic impact of the island’s FITUR 2026 participation at $90 million through agreements, alliances and new connectivity routes. Her framing of the relationship between the two events was blunt: ExpoComPR and FITUR are the same strategy told twice, positioning Puerto Rico as the commercial hub of the Caribbean, Latin America and the U.S. Hispanic market.
Permitting as the binding constraint
The permitting leg is the one the administration does not fully control. The governor presented the proposed Planning and Permitting Code as doing six things: closing the door to fragmentation, providing legal certainty, clarifying jurisdictions, limiting discretion and standardizing criteria, strengthening accountability, and balancing economic and environmental objectives.
“We’re pursuing reform administratively, but we need legislation to make it stronger and more permanent,” she told the audience today.
The administrative half is producing measurable movement. From January through August 2026, according to data the Governor shared today, the permitting system received 92,225 filings, up 34.4% over the same period in 2025, which the deck framed as evidence of more demand rather than less. Cases issued reached 77,926, up 22.2% against 2025 and 84.0% against 2024, with an 80.0% approval rate, 9.3 percentage points higher than before.
Permits resolved in 30 days or less climbed to 68.9% from 46.5% in 2024, and denials fell 37%. Filings for the Permiso Único more than doubled to 42,188, with a 93.8% resolution rate and a 94.7% approval rate.
The legislative half is where the timeline slips. Senate President Thomas Rivera Schatz consolidated his own measure, Senate Bill 1173, with the administration’s Senate Bill 1183 into a 793-page substitute creating a new Planning and Permitting Code, introduced June 23.
The House companion carries as PC 1213. The Senate left the bill on the table when the ordinary session closed in June, and it returned to the calendar when the fourth legislative session opened August 17 with permitting at the top of the agenda. It had not moved to a floor vote as of Friday.
Support is not assured. DDEC Secretary Carlos Ríos Pierluisi told Caribbean Business this month that the substitute “has a lot of areas of opportunity” and is not yet a bill the private sector is ready to fully support, citing a lack of uniformity, standardization and guaranteed continuity in how permits move.
Municipalities including San Juan, Bayamón and Carolina have objected to centralization and to the scope of the supremacy clause. Environmental, agricultural and community organizations have pressed for the substitute to be discarded outright, an argument that has gained volume during the drought.
What integration would have to prove
The governor’s closing argument was that the value is in the integration: a manufacturing production and export base, a functioning local business ecosystem, a larger Caribbean tourism destination, and an island that people and companies increasingly choose to live and operate in because of a lean permit process.
The macro slides support that direction. A labor force of 1.2 million with 44.6% participation, the highest sustained level in 16 years. A sustained record 758,400 private-sector jobs and 211,000 self-employed workers. In fiscal 2026, 27,439 new corporations registered, 3,971 more than the prior year and up 16.9%.
Tourism employment up 4.1%, construction up 2.8%, health and education up 1.5%, financial services up 1.2%, each at its highest sustained level on record, she added. Goods exports of $53.9 billion against $48.5 billion in imports, a $5.4 billion trade surplus that the deck put at $3.0 billion or 129.6% above the prior-year period.
The strategy’s weak joint is the one the governor named herself, and the others she did not mention at all. Reshoring commitments, hotel development and small-business formation all terminate at the same permitting counter, which is precisely the mechanism the Legislature has not yet delivered and the private sector has not yet endorsed. And the dual albatross of local non-Act-60 taxation and the energy and water debacles also keep the island’s business climate at some distance from the Governor’s growth vision.
Whether the Integrated Economy is a strategy or a slide depends on a 793-page bill that has been pending since June and an infrastructure crisis that seems only to get worse.
