Ensaios sobre os gastos públicos dos municípios brasileiros: análises dos fenômenos efeito Flypaper, corrida para o fundo e migração de bem-estar

Abstract

In a country like Brazil, marked by inequalities of personal and regional income, the government can use fiscal policy to try to reduce these inequalities. Also characterized by a high tax burden and sometimes regressive, the quest for reducing inequalities through taxes in Brazil seems not to take much effect. One way to solve this problem would be to use public expenditure in order to try to improve the welfare of Brazilian individuals. However, to make the expenditure policy effective is necessary to know the municipal expenditures and understand their dynamics over time and over Brazilian territory. Thus, this thesis seeks to verify the existence of phenomena that can affect the behavior and efficiency of public spending, namely: flypaper effect, race to the bottom and welfare migration. The first phenomenon occurs when public spending is more sensitivity to increases in intergovernmental transfers than to increases in local income, in contrast to Theorem of Median Voter. The other two phenomena, namely, race to the bottom and welfare migration, are still more related. Economists argue that the welfare migration and tax competition could lead to a situation in which these municipal expenditures (targeted to meet the demand for public goods) tend to very low values. In the presence of these phenomena, a spatial interaction between spending of municipalities with the spending of their neighbors takes place. Analysis of the existence of the flypaper effect, the race to the bottom and the welfare migration is done in two essays for the municipalities using spatial panel data. The first essay covers the years 2000 and 2010 and analyzes the flypaper effect considering the financial dependence, spatial heterogeneity and separating public expenditure between current and capital expenditures. The second one seeks for evidence of race to the bottom and welfare migration in the same years, 2000 and 2010. The main results indicate the existence of flypaper effect and welfare migration. However, there is no indication of race to the bottom.