Gastos públicos e seus efeitos na pobreza: uma análise para os estados brasileiros

Abstract

This study analyzes the impact of aggregate social spending and spending disaggregated by budgetary functions—education and culture, health and sanitation, welfare and assistance, housing and urban development, and labor—alongside other determinants on the poverty index using state-level panel data from 2012 to 2021. The objective was to evaluate which type of spending impacts poverty most and how measures of economic activity and income inequality influence this variable. To achieve this, the Panel Dynamic Ordinary Least Squares (PDOLS) econometric strategy was adopted, enabling the analysis of the dynamics between related variables while controlling for endogeneity and serial correlation. The disaggregated functions model indicated that only per capita social spending on education and culture effectively reduces the proportion of poor individuals in Brazilian states. In contrast, welfare, assistance, housing, and urban development have a poverty-intensifying effect. In both models, the positive coefficient of the Gini index showed that income inequality was a strong determinant of poverty in Brazil during the analyzed period, underscoring the need for more effective poverty reduction policies aligned with income redistribution and the promotion of economic growth in Brazilian states.