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Comment by karmafish | Hacker News Reader

Tourism is only about 5-7% of Puerto Rico's economy. The majority is pharmaceutical manufacturing and services. It's true there is a lot of corruption. Colonialism seems to select for opportunistic and unprincipled public servants. If you want to learn about the island, I recommend you read War Against All Puerto Ricans by Nelson A. Denis. It does a good job of summarizing Puerto Rico's history with the United States. Best of luck.

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Expanding on Puerto Rico's primary export...

Per the FDA, Puerto Rico produced (pre-Maria) $40B of pharmaceuticals for the US alone. 40 of those products and devices were deemed critical as they're the only producer or there's no viable alternative [1].

The largest (in terms of unit count) production was Normal Saline with Baxter's P.R. factory supplying 50% of U.S. hospitals with small volume saline bags (<=250mL as opposed to the more common 1L) prior to Hurricane Maria which took out their production facility [2]. The hurricane is widely credited as the cause of our national saline shortage (though as [2] details, it exacerbated a shortage that already existed for several other reasons).

[1] (PDF warning): https://www.fda.gov/media/108975/download

[2]: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1800347

I was not aware pharma was still a significant part of the PR economy after the IRS Code Section 936 phase out. Thanks for the book suggestion, purchased, looking forward to the read.

Yes, the pharmaceutical tech there has decades of experience; one of the first companies I worked for was a Bay Area biotech firm. They moved a big chunk of manufacturing to Puerto Rico and seemed very impressed by the transition. It wasn't just a matter of lower expense. The tech experience in industrial chemistry was very good. Early 1990s.

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