Costa Rica Call Center Blog

Hmmm. You think it’s a coincidence? Costa Rica is one of the very few countries to have abolished its army, and it’s also arguably the happiest nation on earth.

There are several ways of measuring happiness in countries, all inexact, but this pearl of Central America does stunningly well by whatever system is used. For example, the World Database of Happiness, compiled by a Dutch sociologist on the basis of answers to surveys by Gallup and others, lists Costa Rica in the top spot out of 148 nations.

That’s because Costa Ricans, asked to rate their own happiness on a 10-point scale, average 8.5. Denmark is next at 8.3, the United States ranks 20th at 7.4 and Togo and Tanzania bring up the caboose at 2.6.

Scholars also calculate happiness by determining “happy life years.” This figure results from merging average self-reported happiness, as above, with life expectancy. Using this system, Costa Rica again easily tops the list. The United States is 19th, and Zimbabwe comes in last.

A third approach is the “happy planet index,” devised by the New Economics Foundation, a liberal think tank. This combines happiness and longevity but adjusts for environmental impact — such as the carbon that countries spew.

Here again, Costa Rica wins the day, for achieving contentment and longevity in an environmentally sustainable way. The Dominican Republic ranks second, the United States 114th (because of its huge ecological footprint) and Zimbabwe is last.

Maybe Costa Rican contentment has something to do with the chance to explore dazzling beaches on both sides of the country, when one isn’t admiring the sloths in the jungle (sloths truly are slothful, I discovered; they are the tortoises of the trees). Costa Rica has done an unusually good job preserving nature, and it’s surely easier to be happy while basking in sunshine and greenery than while shivering up north and suffering “nature deficit disorder.”

After dragging my 12-year-old daughter through Honduran slums and Nicaraguan villages on this trip, she was delighted to see a Costa Rican beach and stroll through a national park. Among her favorite animals now: iguanas and sloths.

(Note to boss: Maybe we should have a columnist based in Costa Rica?)

What sets Costa Rica apart is its remarkable decision in 1949 to dissolve its armed forces and invest instead in education. Increased schooling created a more stable society, less prone to the conflicts that have raged elsewhere in Central America. Education also boosted the economy, enabling the country to become a major exporter of computer chips and improving English-language skills so as to attract American eco-tourists.

I’m not antimilitary. But the evidence is strong that education is often a far better investment than artillery.

In Costa Rica, rising education levels also fostered impressive gender equality so that it ranks higher than the United States in the World Economic Forum gender gap index. This allows Costa Rica to use its female population more productively than is true in most of the region. Likewise, education nurtured improvements in health care, with life expectancy now about the same as in the United States — a bit longer in some data sets, a bit shorter in others.

Rising education levels also led the country to preserve its lush environment as an economic asset. Costa Rica is an ecological pioneer, introducing a carbon tax in 1997. The Environmental Performance Index, a collaboration of Yale and Columbia Universities, ranks Costa Rica at No. 5 in the world, the best outside Europe.

This emphasis on the environment hasn’t sabotaged Costa Rica’s economy but has bolstered it. Indeed, Costa Rica is one of the few countries that is seeing migration from the United States: Yankees are moving here to enjoy a low-cost retirement. My hunch is that in 25 years, we’ll see large numbers of English-speaking retirement communities along the Costa Rican coast.

Latin countries generally do well in happiness surveys. Mexico and Colombia rank higher than the United States in self-reported contentment. Perhaps one reason is a cultural emphasis on family and friends, on social capital over financial capital — but then again, Mexicans sometimes slip into the United States, presumably in pursuit of both happiness and assets.

Cross-country comparisons of happiness are controversial and uncertain. But what does seem quite clear is that Costa Rica’s national decision to invest in education rather than arms has paid rich dividends. Maybe the lesson for the United States is that we should devote fewer resources to shoring up foreign armies and more to bolstering schools both at home and abroad.

In the meantime, I encourage you to conduct your own research in Costa Rica, exploring those magnificent beaches or admiring those slothful sloths. It’ll surely make you happy.

By Nicholas D. Kristof

Houston Airport System Development Corporation (HASDC), the fourth largest airport system in the US and recently appointed to be the administrator of the San Jose airport for the next 25 years, is on negotiations with a regional airline to make the San Jose airport into a major hub.

The airport construction is 4 weeks ahead of schedule and is rolling out a new information system that will enable the Government to know on real time, the number of passengers passing

The information was confirmed Jeffrey Scheferman, president of HASDC and his partner, José Renato de Camargo, from the Brazilian company Andrade Gutierrez Grants (AGC).

According Scheferman, the San Jose airport will also serve to facilitate connections from Costa Rica to other destinations.

On the continent Panama is a hub for COPA Airlines, El Salvador is a hub for TACA and Houston, Texas is the hub for Continental.

In two weeks the airport will be connected to the Civil Aviation Technical Council, allowing government entities to have information in “real time” of passengers entering and leaving the country.  Scheferman said that in this way, the government would know every day how much people spend.

This will help HASDC to identify opportunities to open new direct routes from US or elsewhere, said Camargo.

Now, the airport serves 2 million passengers a year, but the consortium aims to attract more direct routes and hub.

Source: La Nacion

By Simon Briscoe in London
Published: July 4 2009 05:04 | Last updated: July 4 2009 05:04

Costa Rica, the country of fewer than 5m people sandwiched between Panama and Nicaragua, tops a new global ranking for combining a happy and long life with limited environmental degradation.

The country blends beautiful countryside, a great diversity of species and has long since got rid of its army. The merger of its energy and environment ministries has reversed deforestation and helped it produce 99 per cent of its energy from renewable sources. It has also scored highly, relative to other developing countries, in surveys of poverty, press freedom and democracy.

The Happy Planet Index, “Why good lives don’t have to cost the earth”, published on Saturday by the UK-based new economics foundation, combines measures of life expectancy, happiness and ecological footprint to assess the sustainability of growth in 143 countries.

That the top 10 in the list of “greenest and happiest” nations is dominated by Latin America might raise a few eyebrows, as the region is better known in the western imagination for its slums, inequality and coups. Zimbabwe languishes at the bottom along with a dozen other south, east and central African countries.

But the Latin Americans score highly, the report suggests, due to non-material aspirations and strong social capital among friends and relatives. The grim performance of the developed world might also prompt some westerners to cast doubt over the value of the report. Among the rich nations, the highest placed country is the Netherlands – but it manages only 43rd.

The UK languishes midway down the table – 74th, behind Germany, Italy and France but ahead of Japan and Ireland. The US fares particularly poorly, in 114th place. The western countries have long life expectancy and people are reasonably happy, but the countries suffer in the rankings due to their ecological footprint, reflecting high levels of consumption.

The challenge for the west, the report says, is not to keep increasing incomes but to aim for more meaningful lives and stronger social ties. That might be a leap too far in the near term but the index is released when policymakers are exploring broader measures of progress rather than a desire to boost growth. French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s “Commission on the measurement of economic performance and social progress” is due to report soon.

Critics of such measures and summary indices say they are based on arbitrary data and calculations but most welcome their contribution to the policy debate.

“HPI is one of the several attempts to go ‘beyond GDP’ and to bring attention to important aspects of our life,” Enrico Giovannini, chief statistician at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, said. But, he added, “It is impossible to capture in a single indicator the complexity of our society.”

Source: The Financial Times Limited 2009

In spite of nearly universal support for a cleaner globe, it’s mainly the rich nations that enjoy pristine environments, according to the Environmental Performance Index (EPI).

EPI is an index developed by Columbia University’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network and Yale University’s Center for Environmental Law and Policy to highlight the cleanest countries.

Switzerland tops the list with an overall EPI score of 95.5 out of 100, while European countries account for 14 of the top 20 environmental performers.

The U.S., once a leader in environmental protection, has failed to keep pace. “Starting 25 years ago, the United States started to fall behind in relative terms. The U.S. scores a meager 63.5 on the ecosystem vitality scale, vs. an average score of 74.2 for the world’s richest nations. The U.S.’ overall EPI score is 81, putting it in 39th place on the list.

A few developing nations break into the top 10 of the rankings. Costa Rica has a per-capita gross domestic product of $11,600, but ranks fifth overall as it protects its forests and rich biodiversity, both lures for ecotourists.

The Top 5 + the U.S.

• Switzerland (#1)
• Sweden (#2—tie)
• Norway (#2—tie)
• Finland (#4)
• Costa Rica (#5)
• United States (#39)

Source: Forbes

Last year Costa Rica met its goal of planting 7 million trees on a campaign led by the Environment Minister.

“More than seven million trees planted in 2008 helped offset 2.3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide”, explained the Environment Minister, Roberto Dobles.

Costa Rica has a goal to become “Carbon Neutral” in 2021.

The Minister also explained that those numbers place Costa Rica as the leading country in the world in terms of the number of trees planted per square meter and the number of trees planted on a per capita basis. Dobles added that the country will keep the goal of seven million new trees in 2009.

Permalink: http://www.nacion.com/ln_ee/2009/enero/28/aldea1855244.html

Costa Rica’s legislators finally approved the country’s adherence to the Dominican Republic-Central America Free-Trade Agreement on November 11th, making it the last of the six regional signatories to the accord with the US to ratify it. The president, Oscar Arias, says he will push to make sure it is fully enacted by January 1st.

The trade deal, known as DR-CAFTA, was signed in 2004, and the other signatories ratified and implemented it over the course of the subsequent few years. In each case, this required passage of a series of domestic laws to adhere to the conditions of the trade pact. Passage of these laws was subject to repeated and often lengthy delays in Costa Rica, however, leading to several extensions of the deadline for implementation.

Numerous hurdles

Previous hurdles to DR-CAFTA ratification included stiff congressional opposition to its passage from the start, and in particular to provisions that opened up the state-run insurance and telecommunications industries to competition. This forced the president to call a national referendum on the accord in October 2007. Around 52% of voters endorsed the trade pact against 48% who opposed it. While the results were close, they were sufficient to make the referendum binding and to hand a political victory to Mr Arias.

Joining the club

With its January 1st implementation, Costa Rica will join the other signatories—Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua—in benefiting from enhanced market access to the US and to each others’ markets. The government also believes that DR-CAFTA will attract investment, boost economic growth, reduce unemployment and benefit the poor.

Unlike previous trade perks offered the Central American countries under the Caribbean Basin Initiative, which expired this year, DR-CAFTA offers the security of a permanent treaty. Not only will it expand Costa Rica’s access to the US market, it will also safeguard that access under international law. Further, the accord includes enhanced protection for foreign investors and recognises patents for US-made medicines. It is therefore apt to attract new long-term foreign investors looking at Costa Rica as a base for exports to the US.

Even without the treaty, Costa Rica has been more successful than many of its neighbours in diversifying its economy and attracting specialised foreign direct investment (FDI) in areas such as call centres and high-tech manufacturing. DR-CAFTA will now open up previously closed sectors, like telecommunications, insurance and other services, bringing in more FDI.

At the same time, however, new competition could well hurt the state-run phone and insurance companies as well as vulnerable producers such as small businesses and farmers. Many such producers, hit with US goods that will now enter Costa Rica tariff free for the first time, will either have to modernise and adapt, or risk having to shut their doors completely.

Beyond DR-CAFTA

Meanwhile, Costa Rica sees trade as its most important motor of economic growth and is seeking other free-trade deals. It intends to pursue deeper regional trade integration and to secure trade agreements with the EU (together with the other countries in Central America), China and Panama.

Permalink: http://viewswire.eiu.com/index.asp?layout=VWArticleVW3&article_id=1543960139&region_id=&country_id=190000019&refm=vwCtry&page_title=Latest+analysis

• Use energy more efficiently, allowing us to do more with less (Its also the cheapest way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.) Investments in efficiency are often win-win, sometimes paying for themselves in just months

• Require that utilities produce a specific percentage of electricity from renewable energy

• Spur the innovation necessary to meet today's critical environmental, economic and security challenges by investing on renewable energy, energy efficiency and advanced transportation technologies.

Given the fact that that more than close to 80% of the Electric Energy in the United States comes non renewable sources, Google said it would spend hundreds of millions of dollars in renewable energies to reduce Google’s own mounting energy costs to run its vast data centers, while also fighting climate change and helping to reduce the world’s dependence on fossil fuels.

Companies in Costa Rica that pledge to fight climate change, only need to plug in to the electric grid and take advantage of the fact that over the last ten years Costa Rica has produced between 91% to 99% of its Electric Energy from renewable sources including Hydroelectric, Geothermal, Wind and Biomass.

Costa Rica has built over years the infrastructure to help its business community lead the efforts to figth Climate Change.

Manfred Kissling

Publisher

mkissling@obsamericas.com