Latin America’s best and worst countries in transport infrastructure.

BY JOACHIM BAMRUD

Latin American countries have the potential to significantly boost exports if they reduce transportation costs by expanding paved roads and promoting the use of lower-cost railways and waterways, according to a new report from the Inter-American Development Bank.

If transport costs were reduced by as little as 1 percent,  Mexico’s exports alone could grow by 4 percent and in Colombia by as much as 7.9 percent, according to the report Too Far to Export, which was released last week.

Colombia already benefits from having Latin America’s highest ratio of paved roads, but its overall transport infrastructure ranks 9^th in the region, according to the latest Latin America Transport Infrastructure Ranking from Latinvex. One factor that pulls it down is the poor quality of key roads as well as railways.

The ranking is the most extensive of its kind and looks at 17 key factors that measure a country’s transport infrastructure quality: Quality of ports, air transport, railway and roads; cost, time and documents required to export and import containers; efficiency of customs and border management clearance, ease of arranging competitively priced shipments, competence and quality of logistics services, ability to track and trace consignments, frequency with which shipments reach consignees within scheduled or expected delivery times and percent of paved roads and airport runways.

The ranking of 19 countries uses data from various Latin American governments, The World Bank, the World Economic Forum and the Central Intelligence Agency.

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Keywords: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Central America, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela:

THE DATA