Costa Rica

The country that abolished its army and spent the money on schools, which is the whole explanation for how differently it turned out. Colonial Costa Rica was poor and had little indigenous labour to exploit, so it developed as smallholder farming rather than as large estates - the usual explanation for why it produced no landed oligarchy and no long line of caudillos. Coffee and later bananas built the economy from the nineteenth century. After a disputed election produced a short civil war in 1948, the victor Jose Figueres abolished the military in the 1949 constitution, granted women and Afro-Caribbean residents the vote, nationalised the banks, and then handed power to the man who had won the disputed election. The country has held free elections continuously since. Oscar Arias won the Nobel peace prize in 1987 for the plan that ended the Central American wars while his neighbours were still fighting them. About a quarter of the land is protected, and the country reversed severe deforestation to roughly double its forest cover, one of the few to do so. Ecotourism and medical devices have replaced agriculture as the main earners. San Jose is the capital. The country has about five million people. It holds around five per cent of the world's known species on a third of a per cent of its land. Electricity comes almost entirely from renewable sources, and the country has run for long stretches without fossil generation. Its people are called Ticos. Life expectancy exceeds that of the United States.

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