Special Report: How to be small and successful in Latin America (ISSN 17414474)

The basic conclusion of this report is that it is legitimate to talk about Costa Rica, Panama, and Uruguay as a group of small Latin American countries that have outperformed their peers in the region. As the table below shows, they can make a legitimate claim to being more competitive, more democratic, less corrupt, and easier places to do business. As we saw at the beginning of this report, they are also high-scorers in the human development index (HDI) and on the available data, have chalked up the highest rates of growth in GNI per capita. On all these criteria they outperform two other groups of their peers, those we have called the ‘small and failing’ (exemplified by El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras) and those we have tagged as being ‘big and struggling’ (Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico).