Q COSTARICA — The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) recently announced an agreement among 145 countries to implement a 15% minimum corporate tax on multinational corporations (a global minimum tax), which also includes an exemption mechanism for U.S. companies.
This would seem like a good way to establish a tax base for large corporations; however, it will have no effect in Costa Rica.
The negotiated agreement stipulated that the corporate tax would be levied, if not collected by the country where a multinational is headquartered, by the jurisdictions where the company operates. The idea is to prevent multinational corporations from further eroding the tax bases of the countries where they operate and where they should be effectively paying taxes.
However, it’s important to understand that the OECD is not an international organization, but rather an association of countries that promote best practices in public policy. They have promoted instruments for nations to adopt, and in the case of the minimum tax, it’s being consolidated as a proposal that, according to some experts, has little chance of success, not only in Costa Rica but throughout Latin America.
According to Luis Moreno, director of international taxation at the Latin American and Caribbean Network for Economic, Social, and Climate Justice (Latindadd), the 15% tax would not apply to all multinationals, but only to those with revenues exceeding €750 billion or $850 billion.
How does this tax look for Costa Rica?
According to figures from the Costa Rican Foreign Trade Promoter (Procomer), the country is home to approximately 1,000 multinational companies in sectors such as healthcare, advanced manufacturing, light manufacturing, digital technologies, global services, the food industry, and agribusiness, with origins in 67 different nations.
In the services sector alone, Costa Rica has more than 360 multinational companies that exported approximately us$8 billion as of September 2025. 46% of these companies operate in the artificial intelligence (AI) niche, 34% in automation, and 27% in machine learning.
By 2025, the country had attracted 55 new foreign direct investment (FDI) projects, 30 of which came from the United States and the other 25 from Mexico, the Netherlands, and Spain. However, imposing a 15% tax on multinationals in the current context would not be very viable.
According to Fernando Rodríguez, economist and former Deputy Minister of Finance, different frameworks exist in each country, and fiscal policy has not been standardized, with the exception of some similar mechanisms such as the value-added tax (VAT).
“What this would allow us to do is establish a baseline from which we could tax some companies, although politically I don’t see much of a future for it at the moment. The issue of free trade zones has become taboo, and with presidential elections approaching, no candidate seems to be considering implementing such a tax,” the expert stated.
On the contrary, Fernández added, some presidential candidates have spoken of providing more incentives, although the fiscal situation clearly wouldn’t allow it. Of course, if it were possible to implement this tax on multinationals, it would level the playing field with national companies, provided that Costa Rica’s largest trading partners apply it.
“We would depend on the United States taking it in, which is not going to happen, at least that’s what President Donald Trump has made clear, so it wouldn’t be viable during this period,” he said.
And what about the region?
Luis Moreno explained that, during the tax negotiations, the United States threatened to impose very high tariffs on countries that levied a 15% tax on its multinational corporations, which caused a breakdown in the negotiations.
This new agreement effectively grants multinational corporations greater leeway, even allowing them to use tax havens in some cases, while a highly complex process of establishing regulations for the countries that signed the agreement continues.
Above all, it is more complex for developing countries, compared to developed countries, in terms of technical expertise, resources, and technological capabilities, to address the process, and this complexity is part of the problem for Latin America.
“Civil society organizations have expressed some concerns about how this global minimum tax has been established, especially since corporate tax rates in the region are much higher than this 15%. The truth is that the major powers are the ones who created the regulations to make the international tax system more transparent, and this process was clearly not participatory,” argued an expert from Latindadd.
Existing research, Moreno indicated, shows that the main benefits of this tax will accrue to the major powers, which created the regulations. While developing nations might receive some benefit, it would be minimal, and in the case of Central American countries, no nation is currently considering implementing this tax.
Great Wealth: Where Does Tax Justice Stand?
Although Latin America, and Costa Rica in particular, benefits little from these internationally established tax mechanisms, the truth is that countries must move toward new alternatives to mobilize resources that will allow them to finance social protection systems, education, food, housing, and food security; and above all, to tax those who have the most, such as multinational corporations and the very wealthy.
The International Tax Cooperation Convention, currently being discussed at the United Nations, is addressing the taxation of great fortunes, an issue that is also being discussed worldwide and that poses enormous challenges to reducing levels of social and economic inequality.
Viewed from a global perspective, while the wealth of the world’s billionaires soared to record levels in 2025, boosted by the policies of US President Donald Trump, as revealed by Oxfam in its report, “Against the Empire of the Richest: Defending Democracy Against Billionaire Power,” the standards for taxing large fortunes leave most of Latin America’s wealthy untouched.
During the first year of Trump’s second term, collective wealth increased by 16.2%, reaching $18.3 trillion, the non-governmental organization (NGO) stated in its report, which Oxfam publishes annually before the Davos forum, where the global elite gathered recently.
“The actions of the Trump presidency, including its advocacy for deregulation and the weakening of agreements to raise corporate taxes, have benefited the world’s wealthiest individuals, who now number more than 3,000 billionaires for the first time, with the top 12 led by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk,” Oxfam stated (see sidebar: Golden Age for Billionaires).
They now possess more wealth than the poorest half of humanity—more than four million people—and are increasingly using their money to buy political power, including media outlets, as seen in Musk’s acquisition of X and Jeff Bezos’s purchase of The Washington Post by Amazon.
In fact, the US$2.5 trillion increase in the combined wealth of billionaires this past year could eradicate extreme poverty 26 times over.
“Around the world, many governments are making the wrong choices by pandering to elites and protecting their concentration of wealth, while suppressing the rights and protests of citizens who suffer the effects of an unsustainable cost of living,” said Amitabh Behar, executive director of Oxfam.
While these millionaires see their coffers grow, they often find ways to hide their wealth, evade offshore taxes, or use tax havens; and the push for global standards to tax large fortunes finds little fertile ground in Latin American nations, much less in Costa Rica.
A report by Latindadd shows that in Latin America, the wealthiest 1% holds more than 35% of total wealth, a figure higher than that recorded in less unequal regions.
There are between 587,000 and 900,000 people with assets exceeding US$1 million and around 14,000 individuals with more than US$30 million in personal wealth. However, the number of people reaching $100 million—the threshold used in global standards for taxing wealth—is extremely small.
It could be said that less than 0.002% of the population would fall into the “centimillionaire” category, which demonstrates that a tax designed only for this group would have a very marginal impact on Latin American economies, the Network’s research indicated.
And despite having a segment of millionaires who could contribute more to public finances, Latin American nations lack effective tax mechanisms to tax them, resulting in a combination of very low rates, evasion, avoidance, and financial opacity.
“For Costa Rica, imposing this type of tax is unlikely. There’s no clarity on how many people it would apply to, and the statistics are underestimated. There are people who have a lot of money, and we probably don’t realize it because they never declare it,” commented Fernando Rodríguez.
Translated and adapted from the article “Ni Costa Rica ni América Latina se beneficiarán con impuesto a multinacionales y grandes riquezas” published at SemanarioUniversidad.com. Read the original, in Spanish, here.