Análise sobre política fiscal: um estudo entre Brasil e Espanha para o período 2000-2016

Abstract

The main objective of this study was to analyze the discretionary policy carried out by the governments of Spain and Brazil during the period between 2000 and 2016, based on a heterodox approach. During the first years of the 21st century both Brazil and Spain went through processes of strong economic growth. After 2008 financial bubble burst in the United States and spread to the rest of the world, the two countries suffered, at different times, a deep recessive process. Faced with this situation, numerous theoretical approaches on how to deal with a situation of economic crisis are brought to the debate in the field of economics. The importance of fiscal policy has been treated differently as economic theories have evolved. On the one hand, orthodoxy, giving priority to the adjustment of public accounts with the objective of restoring the confidence of international investors and heterodoxy, which sees austerity as a barrier to growth. Fiscal consolidation processes have been recurrent in both countries as a way to combat the economic recession. Considering that the expansionary fiscal policy is efficient to combat the product fall, our study seeks to evaluate which policies were implemented during the period analyzed, whether expansive or contractionary, and to see what orientation they had, whether pro-cyclical or countercyclical. To do this, we will carry out a decomposition exercise of the budget, between the cyclical component, the payment of interest of the public debt and the primary structural result, in order to be able to evaluate what type of policy has been implemented. In analyzing the conduct of fiscal policy, both in Brazil and in Spain, we see how this one had a conventional bias, becoming pro-cyclical at critical moments. In economies still in acute crisis, governments reverted to more expansionary policies, being more concerned with the performance of fiscal indicators than with more general macroeconomic performance.