Public value governance indicator for Brazilian states

Abstract

Over the last decades, emerging countries have faced many political, economic and social challenges. In this context, citizens pressed governments of all levels for them to offer better living conditions. In this sense, especially after the state reform movements, Brazilian studies in public finance were mostly devoted to methodologies and analysis of managerial results, or even reviews of programs and policies developed under the New Public Management movement. However, the collective needs for greater attention to the ability to solve the basic concerns of citizens requires a review of previous and later concepts than the New Public Management, such as the Classic Models, the New Public Service and Governance Models. Alongside this reconstruction, the definition of a Fiscal State is analysed as one of the tenants of the present thesis, providing the comprehension of a constitutionally active governmental role, bounded and described by its budget. In this scenario, the resumption of public service experience with focus on the citizen provides the reviewing part of the propositions frustrated by previous theories. For this reorientation, the recognition of agency conflicts between citizens and their governments triggers the need to reduce losses from this clash, with some attribute that could also involve all citizens of the same territory, without any privileged groups. In this sense, Public Value brings the theoretical comprehension to be the most relevant reference for a Governance Indicator, here developed for the Brazilian states, and based on the country's legal framework. For this purpose, public value theory can provide a neutral perspective for the current studies of public governance, which implies the need for reassessment of some of the former indicators, such as the IGovP and IGEB. This thesis demonstrates the feasibility of this theoretical construction and propose a quantitative multidimensional indicator for state-level public finance in Brazil. Based exclusively on attendance of legal requirements, our results differ from the previous findings, revealing that the quality of governance is uncorrelated with the wealth, breaking the inequality assumption that the richer states perform better than the poor ones. Furthermore, we propose a methodological improvement for the public finance governance indices.