The single largest area of improvement for Costa Rica in the new report was in access to credit. Costa Rica rocketed to 7th in the world in the 2016 report compared to 90th in 2015.
Casa Presidencial presented the plan Monday with a proposal to lower interest rates 2 percent and spark GDP growth to 4 percent by the end of next year.
Currently some 952,000 workers in Costa Rica are exempt from the income tax but that figure likely would decrease if the Finance Ministry approves lower income brackets used to calculate taxes.
We will be live streaming the 2015 Latin American Cities Conference: San José, brought to you by the Americas Society/Council of the Americas. The conference, "Costa Rica: A New Investment Opportunity," takes place Thursday, June 25, 2015 at the Costa Rica Marriott Hotel, starting at 8:30 a.m.
Exports of Costa Rican beef to China increased by more than 700 percent in one year, according Leonardo Murillo, a livestock research coordinator at the Costa Rican Cattle Corporation.
President Luis Guillermo Solís and Muhtar Kent, CEO of U.S. soft-drink giant Coca-Cola, met at Casa Presidencial Wednesday morning to discuss the company’s expansion here and an initiative to incorporate more diverse producers into the company’s supply chain.
The Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court, or Sala IV, on Wednesday evening ruled three articles of the country's Corporate Tax Law unconstitutional, and as a result, collection will be suspended starting next year. The tax must be paid this year, however, by this Saturday's deadline.
A recent wave of layoffs across several sectors of the economy — from Wendy’s to Avianca — has culminated in more than 228,000 unemployed Costa Ricans at the end of the third quarter of 2014, according to figures from the National Statistics and Census Institute.
Fitch Ratings downgraded its outlook on Costa Rica’s sovereign debt from “stable” to “negative” in a statement released Thursday morning. Despite the negative outlook, Fitch maintained its BB+ rating for the debt.
