Contributions of the Fiscal Responsability Law to accountability in Brazil

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to present a review of the literature that approaches the issue of accountability in recent Brazil. For this reason, a framework was built to show firstly the concept of accountability, an expression for which, it is known, do not have equivalent meaning into portuguese language. Secondly, a revision was done as to the predominant vision of experts who consider the Brazilian mechanisms of accountability as deficient. Notwithstanding such a deficiency, due to the realization of some iniciatives, accountability seems little by little to get stronger in Brazil In these iniciatives we give priority to the Fiscal Responsibility Law under such a focus and conclude that the afore mentioned Law represents a concrete and current advance of this process. It is important to emphasize the preliminary nature of this study as the analysis is focused on the theoretical basis and the assessment of empirical data is still under way. Moreover, because of the increasing literature on this subject, we realize that this paper does not exhaust the subject since other relevant approaches are possibly not mentioned here including for reasons of space and analytical priorities.