CINDE — Costa Rica's Public-Private Investment and Talent Promotion Agency

CINDE was founded in 1982 as a private non-profit created by government decree - a public-private partnership staffed largely by the private sector but mandated to attract and retain foreign direct investment, and, since the 2010s, to build the bilingual technical-talent pipeline multinationals need.

Attract and retain foreign direct investment into Costa Rica and build the country's bilingual technical-talent pipeline for multinational employers.

CINDE runs recurring multilingual job fairs and partners with employers and Costa Rica's Ministry of Labour on English-language training; sector partner Foundever Academy alone trained 1,686 people in English through one such partnership by 2019.

The UN's International Trade Centre scored CINDE 95.27 out of 100 - the highest of 85 investment-promotion agencies reviewed worldwide, with a perfect score on 182 of 225 indicators - ranking it the world's top agency for five consecutive years (2017-2022). Companies working with CINDE reported a net gain of 19,725 jobs in 2021 and 5,500 net new jobs in 2024; more broadly, the free-trade-zone regime it promotes spans over 400 multinational companies generating more than 200,000 direct and indirect jobs and about 60% of national exports, per JLL analysis.

Most figures are self-reported by CINDE or describe the free-trade-zone regime as a whole rather than isolating CINDE's own causal contribution, and the ITC score measures institutional process quality rather than a counterfactual jobs or GDP impact. Benefits have also concentrated in the Greater Metropolitan Area and in higher-skill roles, raising ongoing regional-equity questions.