POLICY FINANCING AGENDA IN BRAZIL: A MULTI-LEVEL PERSPECTIVE ON BUDGETARY GOVERNANCE (2002-2022)

Abstract

In the Brazilian federative context, the public policy production process is permeated by dynamics that involve different levels of government, which in turn, affect the budgetary governance of public policy financing. In this way, government attention on municipal budget priorities tends to be affected by the priorities of other levels of government in shaping public policies. Given this context, the objectives of this article are (i) to map governmental attention to municipal budget priorities from 2002 to 2022; and (ii) identify how the Union's intergovernmental transfers affect municipal budget expenditures in different public policy sectors. This paper employs qualitative methodology, in that it carries out the coding of budgetary variables in public policy sectors, according to the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) methodology. It also employs quantitative methodology, as it formulates and quantitatively analyzes a database based on the budget data coded in the previous stage and develops panel data regression models to achieve objective (ii). The results indicate that social policies have a high level of budgetary attention at the municipal level and that the budgetary priorities of the Union's fiscal decentralization affect the level of governmental attention on the budget of municipalities, especially in social policies of education, health and social assistance.