A new Industrial Free Zone will be built in Grecia Canton in Alajuela Province, announced CODE Development Group, the firm in charge of building the new business park.

According to CODE, the project is scheduled to finish over the next 15 years. The Evolution Free Zone just broke ground on infrastructure and building construction.

The business area is expected to create about 20,000 jobs that will benefit the people from the Cantons of Alajuela City, San Ramón, Grecia, Atenas, Naranjo, Palmares, Poás, Zarcero and Valverde Vega.

The firm is investing $50 million into the project's first phase. The estimated total investment is $200 million. The free zone will be built on about 100 hectares (250 acres) of land adjacent to Route 1 in Grecia.

"It will be an industrial park, where world-class infrastructure, global ideas, and human talent converge to offer multinational companies the possibility of a long-term plan to ensure their future growth," the firm said in its statement.

According to Alvaro Carballo, President of CODE, the business zone is committed to "being a community-integrated free zone, with global standards that improve the quality of life and wellbeing for inhabitants in the western region of Alajuela."

Last year, the Free Trade Zone sector created almost 188,000 jobs and represented 12% of Costa Rica's Gross Domestic Product (GDP), with an absolute contribution of $7.23 billion, according to the statistics of the Ministry of Foreign Trade. 

Even though new businesses are creating jobs in Costa Rica, the unemployment rate is about 11.4%, according to the National Employment Survey. The data recorded from August to October, show that there are more than 284,000 people without registered jobs. Of these, 162,000 are women, making up 57% of unemployed people in the country.

The majority of international companies that open branches in Costa Rica do so within the regimes of industrial zones. Last week, the San Francisco, California-headquartered firm Gener8 LLC announced the opening of their new manufacturing plant in the Lima Industrial Zone in Cartago Province.

 

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