Comportamentos estratégicos entre municípios no Brasil

This work tests for the presence of strategic interaction in municipal spendings motivated by spillover. To accomplish this goal, the reaction functions of ten spending categories were estimated by Generalized Spatial Two-Stage Least Squares (GS2SLS), an alternative to Maximum Likelihood method. Given the simplicity of the assumptions of the budget spillover model, it was possible to test the existence of strategic interaction using cross-sectional data for the year 2012 - the latest available basis at the time of this publication. The results showed that reaction functions are relevant and positively sloped to nine of ten categories of public services, indicating complementarity relationship between expenditure in neighboring municipalities. With regard to the intensity of the interaction coefficients, higher values seems to be related to greater discretionary power of local government. Thus, it follows that there is more freedom to make changes in expenditures for Culture and Public Safety, due to the sizeable magnitude of the interaction coefficient. On the other hand, expenditure on Education, Health and Public Administration are poorly responsive to changes in neighboring municipalities, because of the existence of legal restrictions that limit the power to manipulate these variables.