AWAY THE PARTIES AND NEAR THE FEDERATION: AN EVALUATION OF EXPENSES IN LOCAL PUBLIC HEALTH

Abstract

With the promulgation of the Federal Constitution of 1988, the federal government delegated more authority to states and municipalities concerning public health policies. In this context, the aim of this paper is to study the structure of health expenditures of municipalities, particularly taking into account political pressures – from political parties – and institutional pressures – from federal government. Using the techniques of decomposition of differentials and quantile regressions, we analyzed municipal health spending in 2002 and 2006. Our main result is the small relevance of political parties in the determination of health expenditures. A more important factor seems to be the institutional pressure via the Constitutional Amendment 29, which established a lower bound for expenditures financed with the municipalities’ own resources.