Como se equilibra o orçamento do governo no Brasil: aumento de receitas ou corte de gastos?

Abstract

Using national accounts data for the revenue-GDP and expenditure-GDP ratios from 1947 to 1992, we examine two central issues in public, finance, First, was the path of public debt sustainable during this period? Second, if debt is sustainable, how has the government historically balanced the budget after shocks to either revenues or expenditures' The results show that: a) public deficit is stationary (hounded asymptotic variance). The budget in Brazil is balanced entirely through changes in the present value of taxes when a shock to taxes is the initial cause of the imbalance. When the imbalance is due to a shock to expenditures, the budge! is balanced through a 40% and 60% change in the present values of expenditures and taxes respectively. Moreover, expenditures are strongly exogenous, but tax revenues are not; b) a rational Brazilian consumer may have a behavior consistent with Ricardian Equivalence; and c) seigniorage revenues are critical to restore intertemporal budget equilibrium, since, when we exclude them front total revenues, debt is not sustainable in econometric tests.