Evolution of environmental public spending in Brazilian municipalities: An analysis from 2005 to 2015

The aim of this article was to analyze the public environmental expenditures of Brazilian municipalities with a population of 100,000 inhabitants or more, between 2005 and 2015. Municipal public environmental expenditures are governmental expenditures carried out legally in the form of funding, investments, transfers and financial investments to fulfill environmental functions, consisting of the annual accounting of each municipality on environmental management function (18) executed from the municipal budget. To this end, a quantitative approach was used for descriptive and exploratory purposes. Municipal environmental expenditures data were collected from 303 municipalities with a population greater than 100 thousand inhabitants, aiming at analyzing the evolution of public environmental expenditure. In addition to the Environmental Expenditure, the variables analyzed were: Green Expenditure Performance, Environmental GDP Performance, Environmental Expenditure by territorial area and Environmental Expenditure per Inhabitant. Thus, the main results show that: I) Brazilian municipalities have, in relation to environmental expenditures, a heterogeneous behavior; II) these municipalities showed an increase in environmental spending in the period analyzed; III) they still have a low budget participation focused on environmental expenditures; and IV) only 20 cities out of 303 surveyed accounted for 58% of public environmental expenditures in the period studied. The main contribution of this work was to present the importance of the municipal environmental expenditure since studies that analyze the Brazilian municipalities are scarce, serving for the comparative analysis of the Brazilian public environmental policy. (author)