Panama boasts one of the fastest-growing economies in Latin America. Panama City is in the throes of a building boom, with the service sector fueling much of that growth, as well as the expanded Panama Canal. Towers appear regularly, adding to the already impressive skyline. The country is blessed with incredible geographic diversity: lowland tropical rainforests, dense cloud forests near the border with Costa Rica and mangrove swamps along stretches of both the Pacific and Caribbean coastlines. Panama is home to more than 10,000 species of plants, 940 species of birds and 225 species of mammals — all in an area slightly smaller than South Carolina. The country is now looking to make creative use of its resources and has set aside 29 percent of its land for conservation and national parks.