Distribuição de recursos da cota-parte do ICMS no estado do Paraná com foco na produção agropecuária e na qualidade da educação

Abstract

Municipalities are federative entities whose share of tax revenues is an important element of local public management. Under the Tax on the Circulation of Goods and Services (ICMS), the Brazilian Federal Constitution requires that 25% of state tax revenue be transferred to municipalities. This portion corresponds to the municipal revenue-sharing quota, of which 35% is redistributed according to criteria defined by state legislation, with at least 10% allocated to educational indicators. In the state of Paraná, 8% of the municipal ICMS share is distributed proportionally to each municipality's Gross Value of Agricultural and Livestock Production (VBP) relative to the state total. In this context, formulating public policies to promote greater regional equity poses a challenge, particularly given the diversity and scale of agricultural and livestock production in Paraná. The traditional territorial segmentation into mesoregions and microregions does not necessarily ensure homogeneity in production patterns across municipalities. Therefore, the main objective of this thesis was to develop a methodology to characterize agricultural production across municipalities in the state of Paraná, aiming to form homogeneous groups according to their production patterns. Additionally, the research analyzes the distributive effects of introducing the ICMS Education criterion in the allocation of the municipal revenue-sharing quota, which assigns 10% of the resources based on the Paraná Education Quality Index (IQEP). The thesis is structured into two articles. The first article applies cluster analysis to form homogeneous groups of municipalities, based on the average percentage shares of the Gross Value of Production for 90 agricultural products included in the state agricultural production matrix during the period from 2019 to 2023. The clustering process was conducted in two stages. First, a hierarchical agglomerative method using Ward’s linkage criterion was applied to support the determination of the number of clusters and the estimation of initial centroids. Subsequently, this information was used as input for the K-means algorithm. The analysis identified nine groups of municipalities with similar production profiles. The results show that, on average, the 20 most relevant products account for approximately 90% of the Gross Value of Production within the clusters, indicating a high level of internal homogeneity in production composition. The second article evaluates the distributive effects of incorporating the IQEP into the Municipal Participation Index, the relative importance of each index component, and the short-term fiscal impacts on municipal revenues. The methodology combines descriptive statistics, nonparametric correlation estimates, and cluster analysis to classify municipalities into homogeneous groups according to educational performance, socioeconomic profile, and the size of municipal education systems. The results indicate that the redistribution resulting from the incorporation of the IQEP produced concentrated effects in a limited set of municipalities, without significantly altering, in aggregate terms, the relative participation of most municipalities in the ICMS revenue-sharing system. Furthermore, the findings show that the IQEP calculation methodology is strongly associated with the number of enrollments in municipal school systems. At the same time, educational performance and equity indicators exert only a marginal influence on the final index value. It is concluded that the Paraná ICMS Education model has limited redistributive capacity and a low potential to induce public policies that improve educational quality and equity, largely preserving the existing distributional logic.