Who gets what, when, how? Budget Amendments in Health in Brazil

ABSTRACT

Introduction:

According to conventional wisdom, individual parliamentary amendments would lead to misuse of the treasury either favouring corruption or draining national program’s resources to other inefficient and scattered initiatives. Nonetheless, individual amendments have gained room on federal budget bills, especially those focused on health expenditures. Hence, this paper has two goals: a) to verify whether the budget amendments are concentrated on the most vulnerable locations; and b) to identify the factors underpinning the decision when politicians allocate amendments among municipalities.

Materials and Methods:

To address the first purpose, we split the municipalities into groups based on their vulnerability. Then we verify whether the most vulnerable ones were the most. The analysis included the construction of an index based on assigned random weights in a Monte Carlo simulation. To achieve the second goal, we used a regression of the amendments proposals face to political, economic, fiscal, social and bureaucratic factors.

Results:

Within each State the budget amendments concentrated solely on municipalities able to pull it off by their own. In addition, necessity-based factors didn’t affect allocation choice, in the other hand, political variables had a significant impact.

Discussion:

municipal needs could be less important due to mechanisms behind the resources’ political use. It’s likely that deputies don’t use amendments to satisfy directly voters in need of public assistance, but rather to build alliances with cities’ mayors.

Keywords:
congressman; Health Expenditures; budget amendments; Fiscal equalization; pork barrel politics