Trouble in Costa Rica

I have heard from various unnamed parties that Costa Rica were heading the way of Argentina. To be honest, I don't know alot about the situation myself, but they Western (Well actually Northern) liberals tend to use Costa Rica as an example of a well ordered egalitarian society in Central America. They definitely have the closest you'll see to a well fare society outside of the French Antilles down is this neck of the woods.

With the ever present global down turn and their reliance on Tourism, Intel and Coffee, It's probably not a suprise that they might be in trouble at the moment.
This is particularly obvious when you read the news in La Prensa this morning that the Government Deficit has gone up for the first 7 months by 47% over last years in the same period.

Costa Rica has probably one of the last real government telecomunications monopolies around. I hear people complaining about it all the time. Supposedly there's a one year waiting period for Mobile phones etc. The news of the Government Deficit will probably set any future liberalization of telecommunications way back, as this is supposed to be one of the few real cash cows that the government has.

While Panama definitely has their fair share of economical troubles, we seem to be doing already here with telecoms. Cable & Wireless, who has the monopoly on trunk calls, land line phones and international phone calls, will need to share this as of the 2nd of January 2003. Everything else is pretty much liberalized, even though the 3rd entrant in the mobile phone market the Dominican company Tricom, did receive a fair amount of harrassment by Bell South Cellular and Cable & Wireless. But the courts have ruled in their favor and everything is now ok. Data is excellent, plentyful and cheap down here, so thats cool.

Hopefully Costa Rica, with their dependence on High Tech companies like Intel, might see the point in liberalizing their telecoms some time soon. But I fear that short term needs are more important for our Social Democratic neighbour.