Call centers: USA to India to Costa Rica

Costa Rica is increasingly attractive as a call-center location, to the extent that several leading Indian info-technology firms are subcontracting operations there.

Companies like Infosys, Cognizant and CSS set up delivery centers in Costa Rica in 2013, according to a recent article in the Times of India.

"A centre in Costa Rica is a great alternative to a site in the United States. Taking cost of overall operations into account, it is cheaper by 15-20% in Costa Rica," said T. G. Ramesh, CEO of CSS Corporation.

A combination of competitive costs and a skilled workforce means that information-technology jobs are also being transferred to Costa Rica, including applications development and administration of networks and databases.

Costa Rica produces more than 45,000 university graduates a year, a number which is expected to increase to 60,000 by 2017. "Costa Rica is a fast-growing destination for business-process outsourcing, due to a rich pool of competitive, multi-skilled talent, with strong domain and language skills and high work ethic," said R. Chandrasekaran, executive vice chairman of Cognizant India.