No. Especially not compared to other countries in Latin America. Costa Rica has a smaller breach between the rich and the poor, and their education system helps reduce the breach even further by providing language skills and empowerment to country people who in other political systems would always be regarded as merely “labor”.

There is poverty, and if you drive down central San José any given afternoon you will see plenty of lost souls sleeping on the street, but this is a slowly but surely changing. In hard facts, Costa Rica has lower poverty rates than the rest of Central America, with a nominal per capita income of about U.S. $7,843 (PPP or relative purchasing power of $11,215) and an unemployment rate of 7%. Currently, about 20% of the country’s population is considered to live in poverty, defining such as earning less than $115 U.S.D. per month.