As in other Latin American countries, this momentum mainly benefited from the impulse given by international organisations such as UNESCO (Finnemore, 1993) and support from multilateral financial institutions. The very limited number of non-academic public research institutes, or for that matter public technology centres (with the exception of the health and agricultural sectors)5 highlighted in Chapter 4, is a Costa Rican peculiarity which will prove to have a negative effect on technology diffusion activities that universities w'ere less prepared to assume. In 1974, the four public universities increased their co-ordination in budgetary and planning tasks, thus opening the way to extending their academic autonomy to a progressive control over budget appropriations guaranteed by the Constitution and to be formally managed by the National Council of Rectors (Consejo Nacional de Rectores, CONARE) established in 1977. Since then, CONARE has played a dominant role in all decisions concerning public funding of research characterised by the overwhelming prevalence of institutional funding (as discussed in Chapter 4).