Costa Rica

Costa Rica is a beautiful place and is quite popular visit location for tourists. Officially the Republic of Costa Rica and meaning the rich coast in Spanish. The country resides in the central America and is one of the most stable and prosperous economy of the region. Quite interesting pottery and other old artifacts have been found there. One of the most popular plants of export have been coffee, although the coffee beans have not been indigenous to the country, since the first time the plants were imported in the 19th century, they have since been one of the major exports of the country making a portion of the yearly income. 

Economy

Most of the economy is based on the export of various goods such as bananas, pineapples and coffee, also a large Intel microchip facility is based there and account for about 20% of the country's exports and about 5% of the whole GDP of the Costa Rica. Altho in the past a major part of the economy used to consist of the export of previously mentioned goods, nowadays such industries as pharmaceuticals, financial outsourcing, software development and tourism have become the leading sources of GDP.

Company incorporation

The usual time it takes to register a company in Costa Rica is around 3-4 weeks. The company type that gets incorporated for offshore use is Stock Corporation. Compared to other jurisdictions a very long time. But there are benefits of a company incorporated with in Costa Rica. The name restrictions for a new company incorporated are:

• The name of the company may not be similar to a already registered company or to any well known company world wide. 
• The company name may be in any language as long as the language uses Latin alphabet.
• The company must use a suffix to denote limited liability - SA or Sociedad Anonima.

The minimum number of board members are three, they may be of any nationality and may reside anywhere in the world. The minimum number of shareholders for the company are two and they may be residents of any country and reside anywhere in the world. Shareholder and board meetings may also take place anywhere in the world.

Taxation

For Costa Rican companies that operate and gain all it’s income from outside the country, the government employs zero tax policy. As for companies that do business with in Costa Rica, the tax rate is 30% which is quite large especially if you are creating a company for the sole purpose of tax evasion. In this case you should go looking for another location in which to register the company. As long as all of your company's income comes from outside Costa Rica the corporate taxation rate is zero and you are set for your business needs. There are no current active double taxation agreements. There are couple of ones that are not yet ratified and couple more that have been planned to be signed in the upcoming future. The country is considered to be in the list of countries in the “Blue zone” - a list of countries with exceptionally long life times compared to the global average. The country is in the top five in the "Happy planet index" and have been in the first place couple of times in the past years.