Governance Intensity and Incidence: Assessing State-Level Financial Governance in Brazil

Abstract

The recent growth of the new governance indicators requires a discussion about misconceptions when transposing means and goals of business administration to the public sphere. For this purpose, the public value theory can provide a neutral perspective for current studies on public governance, which implies the need for reassessing some of the former indicators. In this paper, we demonstrate the feasibility of this theoretical construction and propose a quantitative multidimensional indicator for the state-level public finance in Brazil. Based exclusively on the fulfillment of legal requirements, a 15-year sample of all Brazilian states brought results different from the previous findings. They revealed that the quality of governance is uncorrelated with wealth, breaking the inequality assumption that rich states perform better than the poor ones.