UN-DESA • MIDEPLAN • UNDP Costa Rica

Training workshop
San José, Costa Rica
10–14 December 2012

Participants at the training workshop, San José.

The final, intensive training workshop of the capacity development project "Strengthening Macroeconomic and Social Policy Coherence through Integrated Macro-Micro Modelling" was conducted in San Jose, Costa Rica, on 10-14 December, 2012.

Government experts associated with different line ministries and the Central Bank, and researchers from University of Costa Rica, participated in hands-on sessions to simulate scenarios that will help them to address important policy questions and write policy notes. Scenarios covered a wide range of topics: for example, the generation of fiscal space through conversion of domestic debt into foreign debt and other fiscal reforms in order to finance human development and infrastructure investments, the impact of external shocks (i.e. hikes in food and oil prices) on the economy and the MDGs, and the achievement of targets for the promotion rate in primary education and other objectives for secondary and tertiary education, through scaling up public spending using alternative financing mechanisms (tax revenues vs. foreign borrowing).

During the training UN-DESA transferred to the Costa Rican government the final versions of the project's policy modeling tools: specifically, the MAMS (Maquette for MDG Simulations) and a microsimulations approach to analyze poverty and inequality. This also included the transfer of datasets, including a Social Accounting Matrix, which UN-DESA built to apply these tools with Costa Rican data.

After this workshop, members of the technical team will focus on elaborating policy notes in close consultation with Marco V. Sanchez-Cantillo. These notes are expected to be presented to high level policy decision makers on 28 January 2013.

Current capacity development activities in Costa Rica are realized under the project "Strengthening Macroeconomic and Social Policy Coherence through Integrated Macro-Micro Modelling" at the request of the Ministry of National Planning and Economical Politics (MIDEPLAN). The project activities in Costa Rica started on 20 June 2011 with the organization of the inception workshop, followed by training workshops in December 2011 and May 2012 and working meetings in November 2012.