Government attention in financing health policy: the participation of parliamentary amendments in municipal health expenditures (2015-2023)

• Grant number: 25/00080-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: March 01, 2025
• End date: February 28, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Political Science - Public Policies
• Principal Investigator: Felipe Gonçalves Brasil
• Grantee: Isabela Lima Fassina
• Host Institution: Escola de Artes, Ciências e Humanidades (EACH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 20/07485-3 - Dynamic attention and agenda-setting in Brazil (Brazilian Policy Agendas Project), AP.JP

Abstract

Brazilian agenda-setting literature that uses the public budget as an indicator of government attention points out that the health sector has a high level of attention in the federal budget, with a large part of the resources in this sector being transferred to municipalities, so that health also features with a high level of government attention in intergovernmental transfers made from the federal government to municipalities. With the strengthening of the federal legislative power in defining the federal budget priorities through parliamentary amendments, these actors have become protagonists in the federal budget agenda-setting process. With the imposition of individual parliamentary amendments in 2015 and the allocation of 1.2% of the budget's net current revenue for these amendments, with half of these resources to be allocated to the health sector, the federal legislative branch becomes a definer of health allocation priorities, in order to influence the level of government attention to the sector in the municipal context, since a large part of these resources are transferred to the municipalities. Given this context, the main objective of this project is to identify whether individual parliamentary amendments allocated to municipalities change the level of government attention to the sector within the municipalities between 2015 and 2023. To this end, databases will be created with the values ¿¿of individual health amendments and the indicators of government attention to the sector will be calculated in a scenario with parliamentary amendments and another without parliamentary amendments, in addition to the use of descriptive statistics. Thus, it is expected to contribute to the understanding of the process of producing public health policies in the municipal context.