Business Services in Costa Rica After 4 Years of Deceleration

The overall pace of services sector which has had high growth rates in the past decade slowed during the last four years.

Last August, this activity barely grew 3% with respect to the same month of last year, the lowest growth since April of 1999.

This is from the measurement of business services, including the monthly index of economic activity (IMAE), that the Central Bank calculates.

Yesterday, the monetary authority gave the result of this indicator with a cut in August, which grew, generally, 2.82% with respect to the same month the year before.

Business services include legal services (that are 36% of this index), architecture and engineering services (10%), publicity services (17%) and the rest of the services (37%). This last group is made up of services of accounting, equipment rental, market research, software, monitoring and cleaning, service centers, and call centers.

The number of workers, from the Continuing Employment Survey, which is carried out by the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses, reveals the second trimester of this year a total of 158,000 in the category of communication and other services.

This group includes workers of information and communication, real estate, artists, entertainment and recreation, immigration organizations and bodies, and others.

What does it influence?

Central Bank explained, in a written answer, that there are various factors that explain this tendency. In the 2009-2010 period, the engineering and architecture services were directly impacted by contracting construction, showing signs of recuperation until the middle of 2011, the institution detailed.

Exportable services maintained double-digit growth since 2000 in most of the period, due to the massive entrance of associated companies to this activity.

However, according to the bank, there is an expected moderation in the pace of expansion, as seen in the 2013-2014 period.

2014 influences the fall in publicity.

Otto Rivera, Executive Vice-President of the Chamber of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT chamber), explained that this year also affected the growth in the price of the dollar, to close to 8%, since many of the prices for the domestic market activity are expressed in that currency.

According to a survey that the company Dichter & Neira presented yesterday in Expo-Outsourcing, for 2015, 83% of the surveyed companies plan to maintain their contracts of these services and 15% said they will increase them.

Our thanks to our friends at La Nación – Costa Rica’s largest and most influential Spanish circulation newspaper for their permission to summarize their articles which originally appeared here.

Andrew Makarik

to@welovecostarica.com

Andrew Makarik is the main editor of WeLoveCostaRica, a fan of this sunny country. He is also a loving husband and a has a lovely daughter. By being a devoted family man and the biggest Costa Rica fan, he wants to make more people feel at home there. WeLoveCostaRica unites people and helps them find new home or a new travel destination. This website is a friendly community where everyone can find not only information, but also new friends and travel pals. Andrew is also passionate about IT and programming, so he himself maintains a friendly atmosphere in this cozy environment of WeLoveCostaRica.com.