The poor condition of the country’s infrastructure is perhaps the largest competitive
weakness in Costa Rica. For reasons that are not pertinent here (see instead Cornick and
Trejos (2009)), the government simply lost its ability to legally perform any infrastructure
project of significant size, after the decade-long hiatus in such investments that took place
as a consequence of the financial crisis of the early 1980s. We are getting to the point
where the costs caused by bad logistical infrastructure, and the complexities and delays
associated with dealing with government and regulation in general, are too onerous to
compensate for other positive traits, valuable as they may be..