Costa Rica News – Living in Costa Rica and seeing how most businesses are run as well as seeing all the government inefficiencies, it would surprise me if any of these business owners or government officials actually took Business 101 or Economics 101 in college.
We again got to see the Costa Rican government officials throw up their hands and just say oops. Of course another mistake that did not slip through the cracks and for which no one will take accountability.
Costa Rica’s government unexpectedly revised its economic growth data for the first four months of this year after it found that export figures were incorrectly reported, central bank president Rodrigo Bolanos said.
Expansion in the period was revised to 2.1 percent from 3.4 percent, Bolanos told reporters today in San Jose. Growth in April, the most recent month reported, was cut to 1.9 percent from 3.1 percent. Exports from free-trade zone businesses were incorrectly entered into the central bank’s system last week, which resulted in the inflated growth figures, he said.
“The problem was that the customs system introduced duplicate information about exports from free-trade zones,” Bolanos said. “Due to that, we overestimated the export figures for the year.”
The $41 billion Central American economy will probably grow less than the 4 percent originally forecast for this year, Bolanos said. Inflation is still expected to stay within the range of 5 percent, plus or minus one percentage point, for the year.
The yield on Costa Rica’s dollar bonds due in 2023 rose 8 basis points to 4.92 percent at 11:55 a.m. local time. The currency, the colon, gained 0.3 percent against the dollar to 498.61. The colon has rallied 1.9 percent versus the dollar this year, the biggest gain among 16 Latin American and Caribbean currencies tracked by Bloomberg.
Exporters from free trade zones in Costa Rica include Santa Clara, California-based Intel Corp. and Palo Alto, California-based Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ)
By Adam Williams Bloomberg, Edited by Dan Stevens
