Producto, desempleo y la Ley de Okun en la República Dominicana

The paper investigates Okun’s Law for the Dominican Republic during the second part of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty first. The econometric modelling estimates an Okun coefficient implying that, on average, for every 1 percent growth in real output the unemployment rate decreases 0.5 percentage points. But recursive modelling reveals that Okun’s coefficient has being falling during the last forty years from -0.88 in 1966 to -0.5 in 2013. The drop in the magnitude of Okun’s coefficient and the inertia in the number of workers registered out of the labour supply could help in illuminating episodes of ‘jobless growth’ observed for the Dominican Republic. The analysis also reveals that the implicit average rate of real output growth consistent with stable unemployment is 4.5% per annum.