Costa Rica Foreign Investment Created Thousands of New Jobs in 2017

Costa Rica’s investment promotion agency, CINDE, has claimed that the 40 investment projects it supported in 2017 generated almost 14,000 new jobs in the Central American country.

“The multinational companies attracted by CINDE’s support generated 20% of net formal jobs in the country and 23% of the total employment created within the private sector in 2017,” said Jorge Sequeira, Managing Director of CINDE, in a press release.

Most of these multinationals are in the life sciences, global services, manufacturing, and food processing sectors. Costa Rica received just over US$2 billion in foreign direct investment in the last 9 months of 2017, according to the Minister for Foreign Trade.

The multinationals that CINDE has helped to set up operations over the past few years have created 97,587 jobs so far, the agency claimed.

“It is important to indicate that the employment growth rate in the multinationals was 7.8%. This means it was 3.7 times more than the country’s average that reported a growth of 2.1%,” Sequeira added.

This year, the agency says it will focus on advising the government on improving infrastructure, human skills, and reducing procedures needed to build up operations in Costa Rica. In addition, it will drum up trade in Europe and Asia in addition to Latin America and the United States.

“There is a potential of having a bigger growth in the job generation that, as a country, we could take advantage of if we continue to create the human resource specialized in professional and technical areas of high demand, with the abilities that the market requires and the handling of second languages,” said President of CINDE’s Board of Directors, Luis Gamboa. “In the challenging conditions that we face, this theme must be a national priority to continue creating more quality jobs and opportunities for the population.”