In 2022, the participation of government consumption in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was 18%, below the 18.6% in 2021.
It is the lowest level in the historical series about the weight of the State, made since 1996 by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE).
In calculating the GDP, government consumption is not the same as the public spending that goes into the budgets of the federal entities.
It refers to spending to provide public services such as education, health, and security and does not include, for example, public spending on cash transfer programs.
The oscillations in the share of government consumption in GDP are small over the years – between 18% and 20%.
However, they show a trend of decreasing the weight of the state, which began to manifest itself in 2016, the year of the impeachment of then-President Dilma Rousseff.
According to economist Silvia Matos, from the Brazilian Institute of Economics of the Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV Ibre), between 1996 and 2004, there was an average growth in the weight of the State of 1.7%.
Between 2005 and 2015, the average growth was 2.3%.
“In PT governments, over many years, the government grew, salaries (of civil servants) grew, and government consumption gained prominence,” said Silvia to the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo.
As this period also saw faster GDP growth, the participation of government consumption in the economy did not grow so much – it went from 18.5% in 2004 to 19.8% in 2015.
The break is evident in the most recent period because the average growth in government consumption between the first quarter of 2016 and the fourth quarter of 2022 was zero.
The share of GDP has also declined, only slowly.
In 2016, as the economy was in recession and GDP fell, government consumption rose to 20.4%.
Then it went on a downward trend, to 18% in 2022.
With information from Revista Oeste