Descentralização do processo de execução orçamentária da despesa e seu efeito no gasto público municipal

Abstract

Decentralization in the public sector, in general, has been discussed in the perspective of revenue sharing between spheres of government in the federation and the distribution of decision-making autonomy in the application of public resources and government management processes. This research is part of this context, and it investigates the decentralization of the expenditure execution process, a practice carried out within governments, and its impact on municipal spending. The analysis was carried out from the perspective of the Theory of Public Choice, which presupposes the self-interested behavior of managers when they participate in government decision-making processes and, therefore, the autonomy granted to them to decide on expenditure is important. To operationalize the research, five areas of government activity were selected – education, health, social assistance, sports and leisure, and urbanism – to represent different expenditure characteristics and sources of financing to explain the behavior of managers in different expenditure realities. The data were collected through an electronic questionnaire, whose respondents were managers of city halls, complemented by data from public sources of information. The econometric analysis was done through the estimation of the model by quantile regression for each of the areas analyzed, with data from 290 municipal governments in the period between 2013 and 2018. The results show that the decentralization of the process of spending execution (i) for area with insufficient resources decreased the expenditure; (ii) for areas with insufficient resources and characteristics that make it possible for managers to bargain budgets, the expenditure has increased; and (iii) for areas with insufficient resources, but without characteristics that allow bargaining by budget, decentralization was ineffective. It is concluded, therefore, that the decentralization of spending execution affects municipal expenditure and these effects are different depending on the characteristics of the area in which decentralization occurs, since the behavior of managers is affected by these characteristics. This research points out theoretical implications when it highlights the behavior of managers and the expenditure characteristics of the areas as relevant factors to be considered in the analysis of the relationship between decentralization of spending execution and expenditure. Governments can use the results of this research to assess the desirability of decentralization, as well as consider the need to implement controls on expenditure in decentralized environments.