This is not ideal. One would have hoped to combine the cleansing and productivity-enhancing
effects of trade liberalization along the extensive margin, with a more active government policy
along the intensive margin to deal with the many externalities, public goods, social and other
market distortions that are common in agriculture. Sadly, this type of efforts by the Costa Rican
state regarding agriculture were sacrificed during the fiscally-lean decades of the 1980s and 1990s.
This implied that the social cost of this efficient shift in land use was higher than necessary: many
farms ended up changing owner in order to change crop. For further analysis of these matters, see
Trejos (2009)