The Costa Rican Government has been talking about the need of a tax reform for some time now, the OECD has even warned that without fiscal reforms there is a high possibility that the country will face a serious fiscal crisis. This situation will not apparently pose a problem as the country faces huge loses after the devastation caused by Tropical Storm Nate this last week.

Sergio Alfaro, Minister of Presidency, stated that there’s only enough money right now to face the first impacts of the storm in the public infrastructure.

Alfaro affirmed in an interview with Spanish daily La Nacion that, “the process of reconstruction will likely require funding from other sources”.

Floods, landslides, deaths,thousands of people who lost their homes and/or livelihood, damaged roads, bridges and infrastructure; the government has said, are comparable to those caused by Hurricane Otto or maybe even worse since the assessment is still not completed; the process of recovering from all these loses will require time and money.

“Until we reach that point, I wouldn’t want to speculate about it. What is a fact is that there are fiscal difficulties and these will have an impact over the situation we are facing, which is of big dimensions”, continued the Minister.

At this time, the government is not willing to present a project for extraordinary budget, since this will mean acquiring more debt.

The Government was just recovering from the emergency caused by Hurricane Otto last year.

It is still too early to know which areas and where need to be covered, so the Government still doesn’t have an estimate on the costs involved for the recovery process.