Government spending should be regarded as a social and political phenomenon, not merely as a technical choice. We argue that there is an implicit contract between the organized elites and politicians which often leads to a pro-elite allocation of public resources. A natural and simple taxonomy...

The objective of this paper is to evaluate the impact of government spending with the Interest Rates Equalization (IRE) policy on the economic growth of Brazilian regions. Additionally, it aims to measure the opportunity cost of the subsidy in relation to an alternative application in the...