November 7, 2016
The tourism sector represents approximately 20% of Costa Rica’s total GDP and 27% of the workforce.
In the first semester of the year, the country recorded a 16.8% growth in international arrivals by air and a 12.3% increase through all ports.
Tourism leads the service exports in the second quarter of the present year, accounting for 48.4% of the total service account. This activity consolidates as the one that contributed the most to the recovery pace of service exports in the first semester of 2016, compared to the same period of the previous year.
This information comes from the Quarterly Analysis on the Evolution of Goods Exports (III quarter) and Services (II quarter) of Costa Rica, released today by the Foreign Trade Promoter (PROCOMER), which indicates that travel (tourism) exports increased by 15.8% at the end of the second quarter of 2016 compared to the same period of the previous year.
Mauricio Ventura, Minister of Tourism, assured that these results reaffirm the positioning of tourism as an engine for the development of the national economy, a dynamic industry that promotes entrepreneurship, motivates the creation of productive chains, and constitutes the ideal tool to boost the development and progress of our country.
“Both PROCOMER’s figures and those of the Central Bank of Costa Rica support the importance of the tourism activity and its transcendental weight for our economy. Thanks to this activity, more than 600 thousand people work directly and indirectly in tourism, representing 27% of the country’s workforce. Moreover, no industry impacts the way tourism does, democratizing income, as we have a diverse tourism product distributed throughout the national territory,” highlighted Ventura.
The new measurement of the Gross Domestic Product by the Central Bank of Costa Rica resulted in a distribution of GDP among productive sectors.
It evidenced that the service industry went from representing 10% of the country’s production in 1966 to 40% in 2012, becoming the most important activity, while agriculture and manufacturing lost strength.
According to the Ministry of Foreign Trade, it is estimated that slightly less than half of that 40% corresponds to tourism, implying that our sector, by generating approximately 20% of the total Costa Rican GDP, is undoubtedly the engine of our economy’s development.
Furthermore, only last year, the tourism activity generated more than 2.8 billion dollars in foreign exchange.
Impact of international arrivals
The report attributes the growth of tourism service exports to the 12.3% increase in international arrivals to the country through all ports during the first semester of 2016, compared to the same period of the previous year.
According to Ventura, the growth presented in air travel reflects the constant work carried out to attract new airlines, as well as the consolidation and increase of current connections, with the aim of optimizing our levels of tourism competitiveness.
Likewise, one of the main data to highlight is the nearly 40% growth at the Daniel Oduber International Airport, contributing to the boost of tourism mainly in Guanacaste, which undoubtedly aligns with the figures presented in the National Household Survey as of July 2016, which highlights that the Brunca and Chorotega regions are the areas that have made the most progress in poverty reduction, the latter with 9.6 percentage points in the last two years.