Editorial

Dear readers,

I begin this editorial by sharing with you the importance of the seminar “Challenges in the field of public administration: teaching, professionalization and research”, held on June 20-21 of 2017, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and organized in partnership with the National School of Public Administration (Enap).

The seminar gathered more than 300 participants at Fundação Getulio Vargas, showing the relevance of reflecting on public administration in its several academic and professional expressions. The event brought together leaders of schools of government, researchers, academicians and public managers who presented themes related to public service education and training, and scholarly production in Public Administration, focusing on challenges related to teaching, learning and innovation in times of uncertainty.

Within the scope of the seminar, the 50^th Anniversary of the Brazilian Journal of Public Administration (RAP) of FGV/EBAPE was celebrated, and the 2017 Meeting of the Network of Schools of Government took place. Among the participants, we had the honor to host the Editor-in-chief of the Public Administration Review, Professor James Perry and his antecessor, Professor Richard Stillman; the co-editor of the scientific journal Public Administration, Professor Salvador Parrado; and RAP’s Associate Editor, Professor Fernando Coelho.

All material presented at the Seminar is available on Enap’s website.¹

For this 4^th issue of RAP in 2017, we gathered studies dealing with the interface between politics and public administration. The complexity of this symbiotic relationship characterizes the core of the research in our field and the contributions of the manuscripts presented in this issue show several facets of such relationship.

An important set of articles analyzes the relationship between the economic growth, in its various dimensions, and politics. Luciano Gomes Gonçalves, Bruno Funchal and João Eudes Bezerra Filho found that the promotion of economic growth through public investment in infrastructure is not significantly impacted by the ideology of the party ruling the government, but it is impacted by the electoral calendar. Ivan Filipe de Almeida Lopes Fernandes and Gustavo Andrey de Almeida Lopes Fernandes investigated another aspect of the relationship between politics and economic growth, presenting evidence that local economic growth positively impacts the percentage of votes obtained by the incumbent, both at the local level (mayor candidate) and at the national level (president).

Obviously, this “unreciprocated” relation incurs costs of governing, as analyzed in Frederico Bertholini and Carlos Pereira’s research. They show that the costs of governing (measured by the first time published Government Cost Index) are higher in large, ideologically heterogeneous, and disproportional coalitions.

Other articles present the current state of public finances in the different levels of government in Brazil, as well as variables that influence the quality of public spending and its impact on growth. Paulo Rogério Faustino Matos analyzes whether the efforts of each of the entities of the Brazilian Federation to generate alternative sources of financing translate into the generation of social welfare, indicating which entities were more efficient and raising awareness of the risks of excessive indebtedness. Luiz Carlos Ribeiro Neduziak and Fernando Motta Correia differentiate the productive from the unproductive expenditures and their impact on the economic growth in the period of 1995-2001. They showed that variables related to the basic functions of the government in the economy were positively and strongly related to the GDP, such as social expenditures (housing and urban planning, and social assistance and social security). In addition, the authors identified the positive impact of the introduction of rules through the Fiscal Responsibility Law. Andre Carlos Busanelli de Aquino and Ricardo Rocha Azevedo contributed to problematize the use of “unpaid commitments”, noting that, in addition to increasing indebtedness, the weak regulation - especially of unverified unpaid commitments - is seriously reducing the credibility and transparency of the budget at all levels of government. Finally, Camila Furlan da Costa, Igor Baptista de Oliveira Medeiros and Guilherme Brandelli Bucco analyze the public policy of financing Culture, highlighting problems of concentration of companies and regional concentration, keeping public resources under the control of a few.

Finally, three articles analyze the public-private partnership relations, which, in light of the problems addressed in the articles previously commented, are presented as strategies to overcome the crisis in the public sector. However, as Miquel Salvador and Clara Riba identify, decisions to outsource public services are motivated more for pragmatic reasons, such as the degree of indebtedness, managerial similarity and as a way to reduce labor costs in the public sector, rather than for ideological reasons. The experiences can be positive, as evidenced by Claudio José de Oliveira dos Reis and Sandro Cabral in the analysis of the PPPs of the sports arenas for the Fifa World Cup Brazil 2014. The authors suggest that PPPs actually generate value for money for the Brazilian public administration, especially regarding aspects such as deadline, costs, and diversified revenues, as well as bidding process due to the incentive structures resulting from PPP contracts and the managerial flexibility which is inherent to private actors. The intermediate role of mid-level bureaucrats in improving the complex principal-agent relationship that characterizes PPPs is evidenced in the article by Clara Brando de Oliveira and Joaquim Rubens Fontes Filho, which highlights how these bureaucrats provide to the principal the data on the real performance conditions of the agent and on the compliance with the terms agreed in the contract.

I wish you a pleasant reading!

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  Available at: <http://bit.ly/2xfPj2ip>.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  Jul-Aug 2017