Structural budget balance: a study of the cycle and the primary accounts of Rio Grande do Sul state (Brazil) from 1999 to 2015

Abstract

The aim of this study is to understand the relation between the business cycle and the primary result of Rio Grande do Sul. For that reason, monthly data were collected from the Real-time public finances tool of the state finances office for the period of 1999-2015, which allowed for the calculation of the quarterly primary result without intra-budget operations. These data were adjusted for inflation by IPCA and seasonality by multiplicative Census X-13 and then used to run the International Monetary Fund (IMF) approach of the structural budget balance. The transfers from the federal government were removed from the regression and the elasticity of revenue to the output was estimated through an autoregressive model and resulted in 1.0908, while the potential GDP was obtained through the Christiano-Fitzgerald filter. No adjustments were applied to the expenditures or the transfers. The results pointed out that Rio Grande do Sul is more likely to be operating above trend GDP and taking actions of fiscal contraction, although working harder during phases of expansion. Thus, pro-cyclical policies were conducted on 75% of the years of the sample. When the political cycles were analyzed, it turned out only the cycle of governor Yeda Crusis (2007-2010) had a counter-cyclical bias. Overall, the state is aligned with the cyclicality of the federal government, even though half of the periods that were compared to the findings of Andreis (2014) displayed opposite fiscal stances. In the end, some suggestions were made for fiscal contractions, inspired by Santos (2014).