Brazilian Public Spending Cap and the Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic

The Brazilian Constitutional Amendment No. 95/16 established a spending caps regime for the Union's primary expenditures, innovating in relation to the fiscal targets regime of the Fiscal Responsibility Law. However, the alternatives for fiscal balance are the object of dispute between different approaches of economic and social policy advocacy groups. The purpose of this paper is to carry out an analysis of the value systems of coalitions that defend antagonistic positions in the fiscal policy subsystem and to map the main actors of these coalitions. As a result of applying the Advocacy Coalition Framework, it was identified that the Covid-19 pandemic is an event (external shock) of large proportions. Nonetheless, during the period analyzed, this external shock was not sufficient to affect the policy core beliefs of the existing coalitions. Comparatively, this is also the conclusion we reached when analyzing the behavior of fiscal consolidation measures in the European Union in the face of the Covid-19 crisis.