In this article, it is worth highlighting that the financial “hole” we face is much bigger than we think, and is evident not only in the Union, but also in all other spheres of government, with emphasis on the gigantic municipal pension problem, which complicates things a lot, due to the lesser capacity of municipalities to manage this type of problem compared to the Union. For people to have an idea of ​​its size, in the period 2011 to 2018, municipal pension expenses rose at an average real rate of 12, 5% pa, something shocking. In descending order, in the States this same rate was 5.9% per year in 2006-18. In the General Regime (INSS), it was 5.1% per year in 2006-20, and in the Federal Own Regime, 3.1% per year in 2006-21.
It is finally worth noting that, as a result of the exhaustion of budgetary space for other discretionary uses (notably investments), due to the rise in social security expenditure, the real expenditure on global public investments in infrastructure ended up collapsing at no less than the real average rate of -5.4% pa in 2010-22, causing GDP to grow at the long-difficult-to-imagine real average of 1.2% pa in 2010-22. Under these conditions, if nothing is done to contain this process, the natural tendency will be for investments to soon come to zero in the vast majority of entities, thus being just a step towards zero GDP growth and, eventually, even negative. (In the extreme case of municipalities, what is known today is that, through the suspension of critical payments, there is a new informal debt of around R$500 billion, which was accumulated more recently with the Courts – with court orders -, along with to the General Regime and the Private Pension Regimes, due to the suspension of payment of contributions and others.
