Banca de QUALIFICAÇÃO: DAYSON PEREIRA BEZERRA DE ALMEIDA

Uma banca de QUALIFICAÇÃO de DOUTORADO foi cadastrada pelo programa.
STUDENT : DAYSON PEREIRA BEZERRA DE ALMEIDA
DATE: 03/03/2026
TIME: 14:30
LOCAL: Vídeo Conferência
TITLE:

Who Allocates Better? Allocative Performance and Political Determinants of Public Spending in the Executive and Legislative Branches

KEY WORDS:

public budget. allocative efficiency. intergovernmental transfers. applied political economy.

PAGES: 98
BIG AREA: Ciências Sociais Aplicadas
AREA: Economia
SUMMARY:

This dissertation examines the allocative performance of budgetary decisions made by the Executive and the Legislature in Brazil in light of a normative benchmark grounded in social 

efficiency. Building on the tension between the normative tradition of public finance and the positive approach of political economy, the study analyzes how political incentives, institutional constraints, and technical capacity shape the distribution of public resources in a context marked by fiscal federalism, budgetary scarcity, and the expanding role of the Legislature in discretionary spending. Methodologically, the dissertation develops a counterfactual benchmark for the optimal allocation of discretionary transfers to municipalities based on a social welfare function weighted by indicators of socioeconomic need. This benchmark provides an operational standard against which the observed allocations of both branches are evaluated using distributional distance metrics that quantify deviations from the socially optimal pattern. The results show that, although both the Executive and the Legislature depart from the normative benchmark, the Executive exhibits, on average, superior allocative performance. This advantage is associated with greater informational capacity and coordination ability, though it varies across policy areas. To account for these deviations, the dissertation proposes an analytical framework that decomposes the decision-making process into two stages – the selection of beneficiaries (extensive margin) and the determination of transfer amounts (intensive margin) – thereby allowing for precise identification of the channels through which political factors operate. The empirical findings reveal distinct allocative regimes. In the Executive, political influence is concentrated primarily on access to resources, while technical criteria largely govern allocations conditional on selection. In contrast, within the Legislature, political-electoral incentives manifest predominantly in the magnitude of transfers, especially at the upper end of the distribution. By integrating normative evaluation with positive institutional analysis, the dissertation introduces an operational approach to measuring public spending efficiency and clarifies the mechanisms through which political incentives generate systematic departures from the social optimum, providing novel comparative evidence on the roles of the two branches in the budgetary process.

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
Interna - 1546818 - ANA CAROLINA PEREIRA ZOGHBI
Interno - 1196877 - BERNARDO PINHEIRO MACHADO MUELLER
Presidente - 162391 - MAURICIO SOARES BUGARIN