Desigualdade internacional no combate à Covid-19 e os seus impactos nos gastos públicos / International inequality in the fight against COVID-19 and its impacts on public spending

RESUMO O artigo visou discutir a desigualdade internacional no combate à Covid-19, mostrando a distribuição relativamente tardia de vacinas para os países de renda baixa e a forma com que a persistência da pandemia, exigindo medidas assistenciais, impactou os gastos públicos. A partir de um modelo estatístico de painel, evidenciou-se que o aumento da cobertura vacinal diminuiu a necessidade de imposição de medidas restritivas, que, por sua vez, possibilitou a redução dos gastos públicos. Concluiu-se, então, que a oferta internacional desigual de vacinas está relacionada também com a piora das contas públicas e do cenário econômico, principalmente para os países já financeiramente mais debilitados, provavelmente contribuindo para o aumento das desigualdades socioeconômicas internacionais.

ABSTRACT The article aims to discuss the international inequality in the fight against COVID-19, showing the relatively late vaccine distribution to low-income countries, and the way the persistence of the pandemic, requiring assistance measures, impacted public expenditure. By means of a panel statistic model, it is evident that the increase in vaccination coverage reduced the necessity of imposing restrictive measures, which, in turn, made reducing public expenditure possible. It is concluded that the unequal international supply of vaccines is also related to the worsening of public accounts and the economic scenario, mainly for countries that are already financially constrained, probably contributing to the increase in international socioeconomic inequalities.

Impacts of the Allocation of Governmental Resources for Improving the Environment. An Empirical Analysis on Developing European Countries.

The last years have brought into attention more than ever concerns regarding the accelerating degradation of the environmental conditions which threaten both the present but mainly the future of human society. Under such circumstances, the society and especially the governments need to acknowledge the seriousness of environment issues and be able to develop and put into practice specific policies to counteract them. In this regard, this paper performs an analysis on a group of 11 European developing countries, over the period between 2000 and 2017, aiming first to evaluate the impact of the changing environment conditions and of the governmental actions regarding environment protection, on citizens life, namely on their life expectancy. In order to evaluate, as accurately as possible, the quality of the environment we propose and elaborate upon an environmental sustainability index based on 17 proxies for environment issues, whose values reveal several similarities between some of the analyzed countries. Secondly, using this index and also several categories of public expenses as proxies for the government actions towards environment protection, we analyze their impact on the life expectancy of the citizens during the sample period and draw some specific conclusions on the actions to be taken forward by governments.

Expenditures in the health care system in Brazil: the participation of states and the Federal District in financing the health care system from 2002 to 2013

OBJECTIVE: To analyze the public expenditures of states on health care and the participation of states and the Federal District in financing the Unified Health System, better known by the acronym SUS. To develop the research, two targets were used: “to rescue expenses per government source (federal, state and municipal) during the period from 2002 to 2013” and “to rescue resource transfers from the federal SUS to the states and also to municipalities”. METHODS: This research is bibliographic, documentary and descriptive and used a quantitative approach. Data were extracted from the Information System Public Health Budget, and additional data were collected from the public managers of states, municipalities and the Federal District during the period from 2002 to 2013. Federal data from the Undersecretary of Planning and Budget (originally extracted from the Integrated System of Financial Administration of the Federal Government and available on the Budget Public Health System webpage) were also collected. RESULTS: The data revealed that during the same researched period, the Federal District has maintained the health care system budget, whereas states and municipalities have increased their budgets for the same spending. CONCLUSIONS: By analyzing the results, there is clearly a disparity regarding the investment expended by the entities of the Federation. Although municipalities and states have gradually increased their application of resources to health care, the federal state has maintained the same budget. These results reveal a bit of concern about public health funding. .

Investigação dos níveis de eficiência na utilização de recursos no setor de saúde: uma análise das microrregiões de Minas Gerais / Investigation of efficiency levels in the use of resources in the health sector: an analysis of the micro-regions of Minas Gerais

Este trabalho tem como objetivo analisar os níveis de eficiência em unidades institucionais homogêneas do setor de saúde, tomando como referência as microrregiões do estado de Minas Gerais. O estudo contextualiza o processo de descentralização iniciado na década de 1990, no Brasil, gerando a necessidade de otimização dos gastos municipais e, ao mesmo tempo, aumentando a exigência de maior qualidade nos serviços como a saúde. A técnica de análise de dados, componente do método de investigação utilizado, foi a Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), mais conhecida no Brasil por Análise Envoltória dos Dados, visando quantificar e comparar a eficiência na utilização de recursos para o provimento de serviços de saúde em 66 microrregiões mineiras. Os resultados demonstram que o desempenho das microrregiões na otimização de recursos pode ser considerado bom, em razão de a maior parte delas se concentrar em escores superiores à média do Estado. Entretanto, preocupa o fato da alta diversidade intrarregional, uma vez que os altos desvios-padrão apontam para disparidades na gestão dos recursos da saúde.

This work aimed to analyze efficiency levels in some homogeneous institutional units of the health sector, taking the micro-regions of the State of Minas Gerais as reference. The study contextualizes the decentralization process that started in the 1990s in Brazil, which generated the need for the optimization of the public municipal expenses, and, at the same time, increased the demand for higher quality in the essential public services such as health. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) was used in order to quantify and compare the efficiency in using the resources to provide health services in 66 micro-regions of the State of Minas Gerais. The results demonstrate that the performance of the micro-regions in optimizing the resources can be considered satisfactory, because most of them are concentrated in scores above the State's average. However, the high intraregional diversity is a worrisome fact, since the high standard deviations point out that there are disparities in health resources management.