Costa Rica's China Connection

(Ft.com) - Soccer managers are fond of using a little-and-large striking partnership. One barrel-chested giant of a man to batter through the opposition, the other a nifty little fellow who bamboozles them with his agility.



Now barrel-chested China and nifty Costa Rica (4.6m population) appear to be in the initial stages of just such a partnership.

Costa Rica’s president, Laura Chinchilla, on Tuesday was checking out the potential for building a major industrial park in her country to act as a manufacturing and logistics platform for Chinese companies.

During a visit to China, Chinchilla viewed the facilities of the Suzhou industrial park, built eight years ago. The park houses some 20,000 companies, about a quarter of them foreign. And Suzhou forms a complete city of about 750,000 inhabitants packed with educational, recreational and entertainment facilities.

“This could be a model for Costa Rica, in a much smaller scale of course,” mused Enrique Castillo, the foreign minister who accompanied Chinchilla. The Costa Rican version could be located well outside of the capital San José, Castillo suggested.

In 2007, Costa Rica broke with the rest of Central America by establishing diplomatic relations with Beijing, leaving Taiwan in the lurch.

All the other Central American countries have maintained ties with Taiwan, but the move has paid off for Costa Rica. China has built a new national stadium in San José free of charge at a cost of some $100m. Plans are being mooted for a $1bn re-fit of Costa Rica’s outmoded oil refinery.

And this month marks the anniversary of a bilateral free trade accord between the two countries.

Chinese trade with Latin America is overwhelmingly dominated by Beijing’s huge purchases of food and industrial raw materials.

Not so in the case of Costa Rica, one of a handful of countries with a balance in its favour with China. Of last year’s $4.7bn trade between the two countries, $3.8bn were exports from Costa Rica, of which three quarters were electronic components and computer chips, most produced by Intel.

A big ‘un and a little ‘un can work well together.

Source: http://blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/2012/08/14/costa-rica-working-the-china-connection/#axzz23cWrWtpW