Profile Essay The country of Costa Rica is a famous vacation spot known for its vast outdoor beauty and various tourist sites such as the Poaz Volcano, the La Paz Waterfall Gardens and the many coffee plantations. Costa Rica was the first country in Central America to register the exports in the coffee industry and they began exporting in 1840, because of this coffee is one of the main exports of Costa Rica and accounts for 11% of export revenues. The coffee industry in Costa Rica also makes up 20% of the rural workforce, which makes Coffee production one of the main accounts for jobs in the country alongside teaching. (Ronchi) Costa Rica prides itself in its education system and has a literacy rate of 95% and is the second highest literacy rate in Central America just falling short to Cuba. (Teaching English in Costa Rica) Some 30 percent of the countries national budget is devoted to the Education system and Costa Rica …show more content…
According to a recent survey done by INEC 318,810 households or almost a quarter of the country is living in poverty. Poverty in Costa Rica is present and very evident to any tourist of the country, down almost every given alleyway you can find a dilapidated shack with clothes hanging on a line outside. For most of the country these shacks are called home and feature no running water or little to no indoor plumbing. For the children that reside here there is a minuscule opportunity for them to overcome this poverty and are “marked” so to speak by their circumstances. The average income per month for the household also dropped 0.4 percent in 2014, which stretched the spending power a little bit slimmer than normal. (Dyer) The majority of the poverty falls of those unemployed and the unemployment rate is 8.3 percent. This is the second highest unemployment rate in Central America and only falls short to Columbia’s unemployment rate of 10.6 percent.