Local governmental financial condition in times of Covid-19: a study with municipalities in the metropolitan regions of Florianópolis and Salvador

Abstract

These exploratory studies revealed that in Brazil there is a certain lack of research that uses models to assess the government's financial condition. Given the small number of studies identified, it is expected that the work presented here will contribute to increase and systematize knowledge about the relevance of using models available in the literature to analyze the financial condition of governments in Brazil. The aim of this article is to characterize the financial condition of municipalities in the Metropolitan Regions of Florianópolis and Salvador in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. The research is characterized as qualitative, having been carried out through an exploratory-descriptive work. It is also classified as secondary and documentary, since official information from the National Treasury was used, through reports made available in the Accounting and Financial Information System for the Brazilian Public Sector and the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics on population data. The study was developed based on the Brown model (1993), considering the five largest municipalities located in the Metropolitan Regions of Florianópolis and Salvador with population sizes between 20,000 and 100,000 inhabitants. In a joint analysis, the municipalities with the best financial conditions in 2020 were Garopaba, Santo Amaro, Tijucas and Mata de São João. Although most of the cities with the best financial conditions are part of the Metropolitan Region of Florianópolis, it was Mata de São João who obtained the best total score in the exercise: 15. In the “better than most” condition were Biguaçu and São João Batista, both from the RMF; in the “worse than most” situation were Candeias, Dias D'Ávila, São Sebastião do Passé and Vera Cruz, with Dias D'Ávila and São Sebastião do Passé having the worst total scores in the entire sample, both with -4. As can be seen, of the ten municipalities that make up the sample, 04 were placed as "among the best" and 04 were placed as "worse than most", which are, therefore, the positions where the majority of municipalities in the exercise under review.