Puerto Rico Cash Grants Incentive Contracts Analysis

Executive Summary

This report summarizes Puerto Rico Department of Economic Development quarterly cash-grant disclosures from fiscal year 2017 through August 2025 for 1,735 incentive contracts after PDF extraction and harmonization. Annual approved totals were limited through about 2019, then rose sharply from 2020 and peaked in 2023 and 2024, while the disbursed share within each contract year falls for the most recent cohorts, so a large and rising fraction of headline totals is approved-but-not-yet-paid capital rather than cash already disbursed. Contract-level disbursement ratios are concentrated near 0% and 100% (mean about 40%, median about 25%), with on the order of seven hundred contracts still at 0% disbursement, which flags backlog and timing risk when reading obligation totals. Choropleth funding bands and the ranked-municipality view both show heavy concentration of approved dollars in major coastal metros, notably San Juan and Aguadilla at the top of the list, while interior municipalities and smaller islands sit in lower funding tiers; disbursement efficiency relative to approvals varies widely across those municipalities (some smaller approvals disburse a high fraction; several large approvals show very low paid-to-date shares). The largest single-contract approved amounts skew toward pharmaceutical, medical device, and biotechnology manufacturing, with one Invest Puerto Rico related award as the dominant dollar outlier and cancellation uncommon among the top-ranked awards. Cumulative accounting by incentive category is dominated by machinery and equipment investment, with material balances in other reported categories, job creation/retention, and infrastructure investment, and comparatively small cumulative totals for specialized lines such as technology transfer and targeted SME programs, patterns that align with capital-equipment-heavy incentive use. Interpretation should stay tied to the methodology section on extraction, harmonization, and field definitions that affect counts, timing, and status labels.