Multicointegração e Sustentabilidade da Política Fiscal no Brasil com Regime de Quebras Estruturais (1997-2015)

This paper aims to investigate the sustainability of the fiscal policy of the Brazilian Central Government from 1997 to 2015. It considers the impact of public spending increases on the dynamics of public accounts. For this, the pre-crisis and post-crisis fiscal dynamics and major changes in the evolution of public revenues and expenditure are analyzed. To test the sustainability of fiscal policy, a model of multicointegration with structural breaks is employed with quarterly data. The nominal deficit had a sharp increase, from R$ 343.9 billion in 2014 to R$ 613.0 billion in 2015, a result of the impact of expenses with nominal interest on the public debt to grow from 6.64% to 8.50% of GDP in the period. The Multicointegration test pointed out that the hypothesis of the existence of a long-run equilibrium relation between the flow variables revenue, expenditure and government debt stock cannot be accepted. This evidences a sustainability dynamic of weak fiscal policy, since on average accumulated revenue growth is significantly lower than accumulated expenditure.