This article presents a structural fiscal balance for the Costa Rican economy. The structural balance is an ex-post indicator of fiscal policy performance which attempts to contribute to the development of a fiscal rule. In order to derive this indicator the IMF’s general methodology was applied to data from the Costa Rican Ministry of Finance. The elasticities of tax revenues and current expenditure to national output were estimated by means of a simple OLS model while potential output was estimated by means of the Hodrick-Prescott. The article’s main conclusion is that the structural fiscal balance moves in the same direction as that of the output gap.

Eight countries in Latin America participated in the PISA 2012 assessment, obtaining poor results in mathematics assessment. In analyzing the factors associated with this performance, the results of this research show that attendance at preschool education plays an important role in the future student performance. Moreover, even controlling for variables traditionally associated with performance as the socioeconomic status of the household or the educational level of parents, this research shows that personal factors have a great importance when explaining the differences in outcomes: self-concept students in the math area, their interest towards mathematics and familiarity with mathematical concepts are variables that were significant to predict scores on the PISA test.