The fact that many of the components of the index are measured on the basis to opinion polls
rather than hard data, on the other hand, leads to exaggeration. Costa Rica, for instance, ranks in
“seaports” below some landlocked African countries and below Nicaragua, a neighbor whose firms
actually utilize Costa Rican ports instead of their own. On matters that evolve very slowly—again,
like infrastructure—the index tends to oscillate very wildly, and to be very correlated to the short term popularity of the government. Nevertheless, the data do paint a broad picture.