Productive and Improductive public expenses: Evidence from a panel data
of Brazilian states
Fiscal Policy, Fiscal Decentralization, Fiscal Multiplier, Economic Growth.
The debate about the relevance of public expenditure for economic growth is extremely relevant, as it directs public policies and consequently affects the lives of the population. It has always generated great controversy, because besides economic growth the subject involves the solvency of public sector and the stability of public debt, as well as other macroeconomic topics. The importance of the subject is present at all levels of government, and it gains even greater prominence at the state level in Brazil, since it is a country characterized by a high degree of fiscal decentralization, distributing great power to the subnational governments, furthermore in recent years it has become necessary to create institutional instruments with the aim of putting Brazilian states back on a sustainable fiscal path. In this context, it is expected, along with a reduction in expenditures, a better allocation for public expenditure that are in fact effective in contributing to economic growth. Therefore, the aim of this study is to analyze under the framework of the model proposed by Devarajan, Swaroop and Zou (1996) which expenses are productive - contributed to long-term economic growth - and which are unproductive. I use a panel data of Brazilian states between 2013 and 2016 in which the regressors consist of the proportions of each category and function of spending and the regressand is a moving average of growth rates between t+1 and t+4. The results for the division of expenditures in current and capital expenditures confirm those found by Devarajan et al., i.e., there’s a positive relationship between the fraction of current expenditures and economic growth, and also a negative relationship with capital expenditures. For the functional division of public expenses, the results for the linear model indicate that spending on Public Security has a positive and significant effect. As an extension to the original model proposed by Devarajan et al., a possible non-linear relationship between public expenditures and economic growth was examined, as proposed by Rocha and Giuberti (2007), and the results do not found evidence that there is a non-linear relationship between the public spending and economic growth.