Ensaios sobre capacidade fiscal e endividamento municipal

Abstract

This work includes two papers of mine, which are outlined in the manner of separate chapters and which are supported by distinct methodologies as well, on quantifying fiscal competence and tax effort due the municipalities from northeastern Brazil during 2001 to 2012 and on their public debts. They might reveal something about my motivations: following Battese and Coelli (1995) the first sketches the fundamentals concern fiscal competence attached to the intended municipalities and it makes use of economic modeling called Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA). Hence, working in plain vanilla SFA we show that all the variables we are considering, that is, population, reporting service, workers officially engaged in companies and valued over services stand in a positive relation to the tax revenues. Regrettably, the results also show that the municipality investments and inflation for each year have reduced the inefficiency concerning tax revenue which is due probably to the well-known Tanzi backwards effect. In addition, near to the tax revenue frontier the tax effort of the mean value of municipalities in northeastern Brazil is 0.83. By means of Panel data and with the aim of explaining the precise measure of public debt produced by municipalities whose population is up to 100 thousand we proceed the second article, which uses basically the same insights from the first one. Once we know that all the variables we are considering had a positive striking on the debt, all the other results were expected, including the negative impact on the GDP. However, what is actually surprising has to do with the formation of the mayor, we thought this would have promptly negative impact on the debt, but the results were otherwise.