Costa Rica Import Trade Data: $22.51B in 2023, Up 6.5%

The USA and China Supply More Than Half of Costa Rica's Imports

Costa Rica imported $22.51 billion worth of goods in 2023, up 6.5% from $21.14 billion the year before. United States supplied 38.2% of that total, worth $8.60 billion, by far the largest single source, a relationship that mirrors the dominant role the US plays as Costa Rica's top export buyer and reflects the deep integration between the two economies under the free trade agreement the two countries have shared since 2009.

China ranked second at 15.1% ($3.39 billion), and Mexico followed at 6.4% ($1.44 billion). Together, the USA, China, and Mexico, the top three suppliers, account for 59.7% of total import value. Brazil added 2.9% ($659.80 million), Guatemala 2.7% ($598.12 million), Germany 2.5% ($557.39 million), Japan 2.1% ($465.61 million), Colombia 1.8% ($401.97 million), Spain 1.7% ($388.92 million), and Chile rounded out the top ten at 1.5% ($332.00 million). Beyond the top three, no single supplier accounts for more than a few percentage points of the total, a broad spread typical of a country importing everything from raw materials and machinery to consumer goods rather than concentrating on one or two narrow product categories.

Components for a Manufacturing Economy

Mineral fuels, mineral oils, and related distillation products led all import categories in 2023, worth $2.59 billion and accounting for 11.5% of total value, unsurprising for a country with no domestic crude oil production of its own. Reporting on Costa Rica's energy sector notes that the state refinery operator, RECOPE, had been processing only around 18,000 barrels a day, far short of the 65,000 barrels a day a planned modernization was meant to reach, with that expansion explicitly aimed at reducing "RECOPE's reliance on imported finished fuel products," a goal that underscores how much of the country's fuel supply already arrives already refined from abroad rather than being processed domestically from crude Costa Rica does not itself produce.

Electrical machinery and equipment followed at 9.8% ($2.20 billion), machinery and mechanical appliances at 8.7% ($1.95 billion), and plastics at 7.7% ($1.73 billion). Analysis of Costa Rica's investment climate explains that the country's free trade zone regime grants a full exemption on import duties for capital goods, components, and raw materials brought in by export-oriented manufacturers, letting companies like the medical device makers that dominate Costa Rica's export list import production inputs duty-free before shipping finished goods back out. That arrangement helps explain why machinery, electrical components, and plastics rank so high on the import side even though Costa Rica's own export list is dominated by a completely different category: much of what enters as raw material or subassembly leaves again as a finished medical device or precision instrument only after passing through a free-zone factory floor. Vehicles added 7.4% ($1.67 billion), and optical, medical, and precision instruments themselves appeared among imports too, at 5.8% ($1.30 billion), likely specialized components and sub-assemblies that free-zone factories build into finished devices rather than manufacture from scratch domestically, a reminder that even a country with a large medical device export sector still needs to bring in certain specialized parts it cannot produce cost-effectively at home.

Pharmaceutical products contributed 4.6% ($1.04 billion), paper and paperboard 3.4% ($772.76 million), iron and steel a nearly identical 3.4% ($766.52 million), and iron and steel articles rounded out the top ten at 2.7% ($605.48 million).

A Steady Climb That Outpaces Most of the Region

Costa Rica's import total has climbed in four of the past five years. It stood at $16.11 billion in 2019, fell to $14.46 billion in 2020 as the pandemic curbed demand for machinery, vehicles, and manufacturing inputs, then rebounded to $18.43 billion in 2021 as global trade activity picked back up, and climbed further still to $21.14 billion in 2022 and $22.51 billion in 2023, up 6.5% year over year, extending a broadly upward trend across the five-year span.

Set against the $18.11 billion Costa Rica exported in 2023, this import total leaves the country with a trade deficit of roughly $4.40 billion, a gap that makes sense for an economy built around importing raw materials and components, assembling them into high-value finished goods like medical devices, and exporting the finished result at a substantial markup over the cost of the inputs. For a closer look at how individual partner countries or product categories break down year over year, the data panels above provide the full detail behind these figures.