Also, telecommunications FDI should be down. With the opening of the cell phone market, the big foreign corporations dumped a lot of money into the country to get ICE’s share. Actually, their FDI is a longterm bad thing for Costa Rica, since the profits that used to remain in the country are leaving it.

Meanwhile, some multinationals (the medical device bunch?) are so up to their gills in fradulent invoicing that an estimated billion dollars a year are off the books. Add that of course the free trade zones are thriving. As La Nación reported, the rest of the country’s taxepayers are subsiding them.

It’s not the problem most people believe it is, and silly to carp about labor or electricity rates etc. when the biggest loss is in real estate for crying out loud. The problem is that the old middle-income country model won’t work anymore. People need to shake free of the old model, rather than carp about this or that hurting it, and take this economy to the next level.