QCOSTARICA – Nicaragua is one of the countries in the region that charges the least amount of money for the right of circulation or “rodamiento”, as it is known in that country.
In Costa Rica, we call it the Marchamo.
The payment of the rodamiento ranges from 50 cordobas in the case of motorcycles to 1,000 cordobas for heavy trucks.
That is, it ranges from the equivalent of ¢1,000 colones to ¢18,000 colones, approximately.
Vehicles are classified by vehicle type but not by market value. The municipal rodamiento tax is paid during the first quarter of each calendar year.
In addition, the law exempts the country’s retirees from paying the rodamiento tax.
In Nicaragua, the vehicles of the General Directorate of Firefighters of Nicaragua, the Volunteer Fire Department, the Red Cross, the Green Cross, the Nicaraguan Army and the Police are also exempt from all payment of transit fees, due to the type of service that these national institutions provide.
The Marchamo in our country has generated controversy for being the most expensive in Central America due to a number of items we pay for here that do not exist in other countries. And how they are calculated.
One of those is precisely the property tax of the vehicle, which makes up more than half of the total cost of the Marchamo, and is based on the fiscal or tax value of the vehicle assigned to it by the Ministry of Finance, that is to take into account the make and model year.
This tax is paid annually, in advance on or by December 31 of the current year, to be applied to the following.
In total, there are nine items included in the Marchamo, collected together by the Instituto National de Seguros (INS) – stater insurer, which remits the different taxes to the respective institutions, such as the property tax to the Ministry of Finance, the roads and transportation tax (third on the list of costs) to the Conavi, a bunch of smaller taxes, outstanding parking and traffic violations, fines and penalties for later payment and the mandatory insurance known as the SOA (second on the list of high cost), which the INS keeps for itself.
Nicaragua has the best roads in Central America
According to the Global Competitiveness Index of the World Economic Forum (WEF), Nicaragua occupies one of the privileged positions, being named one of the countries with the best roads in the Americas.
According to the section “Quality of roads” worldwide, Nicaragua ranks number 54, well above the rest of the countries in the Central American region. In the case of positioning the country only in America, it is ranked number seven with a rating of 4.3 points, above that of the rest of Central American countries such as El Salvador (4), Honduras (3.8), Guatemala (3.1), and Costa Rica (2.6), that appears in one of the last positions, positioned as the 123rd country due to the quality of its roads.
Roads of Costa Rica
Of the 1,860 bridges that exist along the road network in Costa Rica, only 8.5% satisfactorily meet quality standards.
The poor condition of the roads is a reflection of the decline in performance shown by the National Highway Council (Conavi) during the last year.
The entity in charge of maintaining the national road network in good condition with the resources collected from the fuel tax and the Marchamo, had its worst job performance in the last three years.
This was evidenced by the fourth edition of the Matriz del Estado de la Pre-Ingeniería 2021 (2021 Pre-Engineering State Matrix), a program of the Cámara Costarricense de la Construcción (Costa Rican Chamber of Construction) that follows the pulse of the processing of infrastructure projects promoted by the government.
This study analyzes both the pre-investment, which are all the procedures, studies and permits that are needed to start with the construction of a work, as well as the progress of the works once the order to start is given.
In this context, it was found that Conavi went from a performance of 1% in 2019 to 20% in 2020, to almost -6% this year.
