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In the efficient delivery of local public services, size matters. Many countries around the world have vertical government structures that are perceived as inefficient because of their high levels of jurisdictional fragmentation. This timely volume examines the different strategies used to address local government fragmentation and their observed results and consequences. Expert contributors in economics and political science offer a comprehensive breakdown of the issue of local jurisdiction fragmentation and provide recommendations for successful policy reform. Topics discussed include economies of scale, the costs and benefits of voluntary and forced amalgamation programs, the correlation between government size and corruption, privatization, and inter-municipal cooperation. A combination of theory and empirical evidence provides depth and makes this book an invaluable addition to the literature. Economists, public administrators and political scientists will find much of interest in this innovative volume, as will professors, students and international institutions with an interest in local government structure and reform.
Ambition theory suggests that scholars can understand a good deal about politics by exploring politicians' career goals. In the USA, an enormous literature explains congressional politics by assuming that politicians primarily desire to win re-election. In contrast, although Brazil's institutions appear to encourage incumbency, politicians do not seek to build a career within the legislature. Instead, political ambition focuses on the subnational level. Even while serving in the legislature, Brazilian legislators act strategically to further their future extra-legislative careers by serving as 'ambassadors' of subnational governments. Brazil's federal institutions also affect politicians' electoral prospects and career goals, heightening the importance of subnational interests in the lower chamber of the national legislature. Together, ambition and federalism help explain important dynamics of executive-legislative relations in Brazil. This book's rational-choice institutionalist perspective contributes to the literature on the importance of federalism and subnational politics to understanding national-level politics around the world.
Abers (political science, Center for Public Policy Research, U. of Brasília, Brazil) provides a close study of innovative city government in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Led by the Workers' Party, the city implemented a participatory budget program in which residents meet in their neighborhoods to determine budget priorities. Taking place in a city long dominated by patronage politics and elite rule, the story is both a sociopolitical study of the impact that state- sponsored participatory forums can have on civil society and a contribution to the theory and practical possibilities of participatory democracy.--
This dissertation studies local public finance in Brazil, with a focus on how federal and state government policies affect local spending and revenue generation. In Chapter I, I provide a descriptive analysis of local public finance in Brazil, with a focus on local revenue generation. In addition to describing the system of public finance in Brazil from a municipal perspective, I discuss the major challenges facing local governments in Brazil and in other low and middle income countries and present the reader with a descriptive picture of local revenue generation in Brazilian municipalities using publicly available data on municipal accounting records, municipal population and GDP, and municipal revenue generation infrastructure and administration. In Chapter II, I study the relationship between intergovernmental transfers and local revenue generation in Brazil. A major consideration in designing an intergovernmental transfer system is the concern that government transfers may "crowd out" local revenue generation. While traditional public finance theory suggests that this will be the case, empirical findings often refute this theoretical prediction in favor of the so-called Flypaper Effect. I take advantage of exogenous changes to state formulas determining the municipalities' share of value-added tax resources as an instrument for endogenous transfers to estimate local revenue generation responses to transfers. I find no evidence that government transfers reduce local per capita revenue generation in the context of two states in Northeastern Brazil, contributing to the limited body of rigorous evidence finding that intergovernmental transfers do not necessarily reduce incentives for local revenue generation and that the Flypaper Effect can indeed exist in certain contexts. In Chapter III, I measure the impact of Brazil's personnel expenditure limits imposed as a component of its Law of Fiscal Responsibility, implemented in 2001. Personnel expenditure limitations require that municipalities spend no more than 60% of liquid current receipts on personnel. I measure the expenditure limit's impacts on a series of public finance outcomes by comparing changes in outcomes among those bound by the limits (those that were initially above the limit) to those just below the limit using a difference-in-difference regression framework with municipality fixed effects and controlling for state-specific flexible time trends. Chapter III adds to the large body of literature examining the impacts of tax and expenditure limits (TELs) but is one of the few to do so outside of the US context. It is also one of the few studies of expenditure limitations rather than tax limitations, as most of the US TELs are focused on limiting taxation rather than spending. While Brazil's personnel expenditure limits are generally successful in reducing personnel expenditures, municipalities seem to be substituting non-personnel expenditures for personnel expenditures rather than slowing the growth of total expenditures. At the same time, the expenditure limits seem to encourage municipalities to ease their spending constraints by increasing revenues where they can. The net effect is a small but significant reduction in deficit spending.
With contributions from leading international scholars, this Handbook offers the most rigorous and up-to-date analyses of virtually every aspect of Brazilian politics, including inequality, environmental politics, foreign policy, economic policy making, social policy, and human rights. The Handbook is divided into three major sections: Part 1 focuses on mass behavior, while Part 2 moves to representation, and Part 3 treats political economy and policy. The Handbook proffers five chapters on mass politics, focusing on corruption, participation, gender, race, and religion; three chapters on civil society, assessing social movements, grass-roots participation, and lobbying; seven chapters focusing on money and campaigns, federalism, retrospective voting, partisanship, ideology, the political right, and negative partisanship; five chapters on coalitional presidentialism, participatory institutions, judicial politics, and the political character of the bureaucracy, and eight chapters on inequality, the environment, foreign policy, economic and industrial policy, social programs, and human rights. This Handbook is an essential resource for students, researchers, and all those looking to understand contemporary Brazilian politics.
An exploration of how states address the often conflicting challenges of development, order, and inclusion.