Costa Rica abolished its military in 1949 and redirected the budget toward education and healthcare — a decision that, three-quarters of a century later, is directly why the country now manufactures your pacemaker. A population of 5.2 million sits on a landmass smaller than West Virginia, wedged between the Caribbean and the Pacific, bordering Nicaragua and Panama. San José, the capital, anchors a Central Valley that concentrates the country's industry, universities, and free-trade-zone manufacturing parks.
Literacy runs above 97%, higher than the US. The country is Central America's oldest continuous democracy, with no coup or civil war since 1948 — a genuine rarity in the region and the single most underappreciated reason multinational manufacturers keep choosing Costa Rica over cheaper neighbors.
The Industry That Ate the EconomyWhat began in the early 2000s as a handful of manufacturers has become Costa Rica's leading export category, full stop — ahead of coffee, ahead of bananas, ahead of tourism-adjacent goods. Medical device exports reached $8.675 billion in 2024, according to PROCOMER (Costa Rica's trade and investment promotion agency), growing at a 22% average annual rate between 2020 and 2024. Fourteen of the world's top 30 life sciences multinationals now have manufacturing operations on the ground.
The products are not commodity goods. Catheters, cardiovascular devices, orthopaedic implants, neurovascular technology, and diagnostic equipment all roll off Costa Rican production lines, most of it destined for the US market under duty-free terms. The sector directly employs tens of thousands of workers and anchors a growing share of the country's total foreign direct investment.
One of the earliest and largest medtech manufacturers to establish Costa Rican operations, producing cardiovascular and neuromodulation devices at scale for global export.
Runs significant Costa Rican manufacturing capacity as part of its global device supply chain, reinforcing the country's position in the highest-value segment of medtech production.
Announced a major 2026 expansion of its Costa Rican manufacturing footprint, citing rising demand and the country's proven nearshoring advantage over Asian alternatives.
Costa Rica's free trade zone regime offers 100% exemption on import and export duties, layered on top of more than 15 free trade agreements including full access to the US market. As US tariff policy has grown more volatile since 2025, medtech executives interviewed by Informa Markets described Costa Rica explicitly as the "resilience" choice — not the cheapest option available globally, but the most predictable one, with 90%+ of one major manufacturer's output going directly to US customers who need supply-chain diversification without geopolitical risk.
Costa Rica has no meaningful public stock exchange for foreign retail investors. There is no Costa Rican equivalent of a Georgia Stock Exchange or a Casablanca Bourse to buy into. The investment case here is almost entirely about the multinational companies — Boston Scientific, Medtronic, and their peers — that already trade on US exchanges and derive a growing share of their manufacturing efficiency from Costa Rican operations, not about a domestic market you can access directly.
This is not a "buy Costa Rica" thesis in the way Georgia or Estonia might be — there is no domestic exchange, no local currency bond market retail investors would typically access, and no Costa Rican unicorn IPO on the horizon. What Costa Rica offers instead is a genuine, quantifiable manufacturing moat inside the supply chains of companies already investable through ordinary US brokerage accounts. The 22% export CAGR and the 14-of-30 multinational concentration are real, structural, and durable — driven by education, political stability, and geography, not a temporary cost arbitrage that China or Vietnam could undercut next year.
Unlike other entries in this series, there is no way to invest in "Costa Rica" as a standalone position — only in the multinational companies whose margins benefit from operating there. Treat this as a research lens on BSX, MDT, and similar names, not a market to allocate to directly.
The honest framing: Costa Rica is a multi-decade structural bet on nearshoring durability, expressed through the medtech multinationals already operating there — not a market you time, but a factor you weight when evaluating those specific companies' margin resilience and tariff exposure going forward.
Costa Rica proves that a small, disarmed, well-educated democracy can out-compete far larger economies for the highest-value tier of global manufacturing — not through low wages, but through stability multinationals can underwrite decades of capital investment against. The number worth remembering is 14 of 30: nearly half the world's top life sciences companies have already made this bet. There is no Costa Rican stock ticker to buy. There is a very real reason Boston Scientific and Medtronic keep expanding here instead of somewhere cheaper.