Corrupção e governo local: uma análise dos municípios mineiros

Abstract

This dissertation deals with the corruption in the municipalities of Minas Gerais, from a conception of corruption as misuse of funds by the political system - keeping in mind that this is just one of the many faces of the phenomenon. The arguments focus on the conduct by municipal officials or politicians who deal with federal funds that are given to the to the municipalities of Minas Gerais. To perform this study we used the reports produced by the federal agency Controladoria-Geral da União (CGU) in its Programme of Inspections from Public Lotteries. This program, since its inception in 2003 until the beginning of this dissertation in 2009, has inspected 169 municipalities of Minas Gerais. So the target of this dissertation were the irregularities found by the CGU in these towns. First, there was made a general profile of the situation in those cities surveyed by the CGU from 2003 to 2009 in the incidence of irregularities, highlighting which areas would be in a more critical situation. The research suggests that the health area is one that presents the worst situation for the occurrence of irregularities. These, in turn, were taken as proxies for the occurrence of corruption in municipalities and from the amount of irregularities found statistical tests were performed in order to establish which factors - indicated by the literature - could be taken as determinants of corruption at the local level. Thus, from the identification of political, social, economic and demographic characteristics was proven that the municipal characteristics - population size, the Human Development Index, the Gini Index, the level of literacy and education, the income, the amount of indigent and the geographical area of the state - along with the characteristic of transfers - the amount of funds transferred by the federal government all this added to the situation of the control in the city - the distance between the city and the capital Belo Horizonte - were significantly associated with the incidence of irregularities (corruption) in the mining municipalities. This information is part of a profile of corruption in the cities monitored by the CGU in the state of Minas Gerais, which shows how this phenomenon is distributed in terms of areas and what are the possible factors that can explain the occurrence of corruption in local governments.