Costa Rica
GDP per capita to 2060, by scenario
Constant-rate scenario path; the 2060 endpoint levels are illustrative, not forecasts.
Factor profile
Firms moved factory and office work here for its labor cost: assembly lines, garments, call centers and IT services sold abroad. AI and robots can increasingly do that work.
How this economy meets AI
Today’s production, workforce and automation baseline — context for the scenarios, outside the AGI Growth Index.
Where output comes from (% of GDP)
Where people work (% of employment)
Informal employment
Current automation exposure
Several parts of the economy could transmit AI’s effects. The pace depends on adoption by firms, connectivity and movement of workers between sectors.
Sources: World Bank WDI; ILOSTAT; Global Automation Atlas (Garg, Crosta & Baier, 2026). The latest available year is shown for each measure; vintages differ, so shares may not sum to 100.
Where Costa Rica starts
Costa Rica enters the AGI era as a stalled middle: middling income, middling scores, and steady but unspectacular growth. At about $19,970 per person, it sits mid-table in Latin America, a region mostly outside the blocs that decide access to chips and capital. Its strengths are human. Language inclusion scores 4.3, its highest mark, built on strong schooling and widespread English. AI diffusion sits at 3.2, and its demographics score 3.6. Real assets sit behind these numbers: Intel's chip assembly-and-test plant, a large medical-device export industry, CINDE's investment promotion, OECD membership since 2021, and an electricity grid that runs on close to 100% renewable power. The binding constraints are physical. Compute and energy access scores 1.1, physical build speed 1.9. Ten-year trend growth is 3.5% a year.
The three paths
These are simulations, not forecasts. The Modest path is the baseline; the two AGI scenarios fork from it. Under the Modest scenario, AI stays a normal technology. Costa Rica would gain a little on trend: 3.7% growth a year, 48th of 157. At that pace the economy doubles in about 19 years. Under Gradual takeoff, growth would climb over two decades and reach 8.1% a year once AGI matures around 2045. That matches the regional median, and the economy would double in under nine years. Yet its rank would fall to 83rd. Under Fast takeoff, growth would reach 8.6% a year from the early 2030s, a doubling in about eight years, and its rank would again sit at 83rd. The paradox is real: Costa Rica grows faster under both AGI scenarios, yet slips down the table, because faster-moving economies pull away. Regulation and politics could slow or redirect any path. How Costa Ricans and their government respond to transformative AI is a variable the model holds constant.
How you would know which world you are in
The scenarios look almost the same until about 2030. So watch leading indicators, not GDP, and watch them live. Three global signals matter most. First, whether the METR task horizon curve keeps doubling every four to five months through 2027–28; METR publishes it at metr.org. Second, whether frontier lab revenue and capital spending keep compounding; Epoch AI tracks both at epoch.ai. Third, whether growth in the ten to twenty most-ready economies — the United States and China above all — breaks above trend in the early 2030s. Double-digit growth there within a couple of years of 2030 would signal a fast world. A point or two above trend by the mid-2030s would signal a gradual one. A fade back to trend would signal a modest one. Costa Rica's own tells would arrive earlier than the growth data: an Intel expansion and its order books, medical-device export orders, hyperscaler announcements of a cloud region on the clean grid, and CINDE's free-zone investment pipeline.
If growth goes explosive
Explosive is relative. At 8.1 to 8.6% growth a year, Costa Rica would run roughly with its region, but far behind the frontier, where the United States could be compounding at nearly 39% a year. This is catch-up by Costa Rica's own history, not a breakout. The economy would double about every eight years, so a child starting school now would finish it in a country twice as rich. Manufacturing, already 64% of exports, could deepen, and rising wages would draw more workers into formal jobs. There is an honest downside, and it fits the stalled-middle pattern. Costa Rica would host computing it rents rather than owns, and it sits outside the chip-supplying blocs, so strategic investment tends to arrive late and imported. That is the drift risk: gains come, but the gap to the frontier widens year by year. The hedge is to own capacity rather than rent it, and to lock in trusted-partner access early. Even then, the pace-setter would shift to the state, testing how fast SETENA's environmental permits, the ICE power utility and municipal approvals can move.
What Costa Rica can do now
Three levers follow from the scores, and two of them pay off whether or not AGI arrives. The first is physical build speed, low at 1.9. Statutory time limits on permits, one-stop approvals and land pre-zoned for industry would speed every project, AI or not. That makes it a no-regret move. The second is geopolitical positioning, at 2. Deepening OECD and trusted-partner ties, keeping capital markets open and negotiating technology access carve-outs would protect the economy under every scenario. It is the second no-regret lever. The third is the bet. Compute and energy access, at 1.1, barely moves growth if AI stays ordinary, but under fast takeoff it becomes Costa Rica's single biggest lever. The country's near-100% renewable grid is a genuine draw; the task is to package power, land and quick permits to attract hyperscale investment. Mexico did this in Querétaro, turning it into one of the hemisphere's fastest-growing data center clusters. A cautious government can act on the two no-regret levers today and lose nothing. Open the atlas's policy editor to test how moving these scores reshapes each path.
Use the policy editor to test how different factor scores change Costa Rica’s modeled path. The roadmap builder below can then incorporate those targets into a 1,000-day planning prompt.
Drafted with Claude, Anthropic’s AI model, from the atlas’s data and an editorial template set by the author.
Create a 1000-day AGI and growth roadmap prompt
This prompt can be used with Claude, ChatGPT or an open-weight model hosted on your institution’s systems. It includes the atlas material for Costa Rica: the country brief, economic structure, region, archetype and global scenarios. It instructs the model to ask for local information, use existing strategies and the political calendar, and preserve the atlas’s interpretation rules. The prompt is assembled in your browser; the information entered here is not sent elsewhere.
1 · Read the brief → 2 · Set targets in the policy editor → 3 · Generate and copy the prompt → 4 · Run it with an approved model, with high reasoning effort and web access where permitted
Instructions are generated in the selected language; the data annex remains in English. Translations are machine-drafted, and corrections from native speakers are welcome through the contact links on the start page.