Tourists – overnight visitors – to the Dominican Republic have increased from 560,000 in 1984 to 6.6 million in 2018 – a nearly 12-fold increase in 34 years. Hotel rooms and tourism jobs have increased by similar factors. The eastern tip of the island was home to only a few families in the...

Food is not a trivial issue in the Caribbean. The islands of the Caribbean are usually characterized as densely populated and dependent on food imports as a result of their colonial history as producers of sugar in large plantations and under conditions of slavery. The story is largely true....

The Dominican Republic is the most popular tourist destination in the Caribbean islands, by a comfortable margin. More tourists visited the Dominican Republic in 2017 than Jamaica and Puerto Rico combined. Cuba, arguably the most exotic destination in the Caribbean these days, and the largest of...

For the Dominican Republic, as for many Caribbean islands, sugar once defined the export sector. But times have changed, and the history of exports is less dominated by sugar in the Dominican Republic than in most Caribbean islands. In more recent history, agricultural exports have diversified...

This paper examines the growing economic impact of MLB on the Dominican economy. After introducing the Dominican baseball experience, it examines the rapid growth of salaries paid to Dominican-born major league players and provides perspective on how the growth in those salaries relates to...

While economists generally assume that producers adopt new technology when it makes sense to do so, historians do not necessarily agree; and the views of the latter may have greater influence over popular thought. Deborah Fitzgerald, a historian of technology at MIT has argued that farmers were...

The paper examines local food and food production in the Dominican Republic and how local agriculture intersects with the tourism and restaurant sectors. It argues that not only has tourism created a demand for local produce, and thus provided jobs and income for Dominicans far removed from the...

The tractor provides an interesting example in the adoption and diffusion of technology and the contextual factors that affected it – especially when contrasted with the automobile. The first tractors were developed around 1892 and did not arrive on more than 25 percent of farms until nearly...

Stationary gasoline engines began to appear on U.S. farms around 1895. Within 20 years later their numbers had exploded to one million; yet their use has received scant attention. This paper examines the demand for stationary power on the farm and compares alternative power sources in 1895. It...