Health pact: approaches and collisions in the federal arena.

This article analyze the institutional construction process of the Health Pact, consolidated in 2006 and that expresses an incremental evolution of the regulatory framework of federative relationships in Brazilian National Health System. Even considering that such process has developed in a federative parity arena ( CIT) it is assumed the general hypothesis of Brazilian literature about federalism that suggests the Federal Government dominant role in the formulation of social policies. Using an institutionalist approach, focusing on the relationship between Federalism and Public Policy it was done a qualitative study starting from semi-structured interviews with managers and consultants who participated in the process and analyzing the minutes of meetings from CIT between 2004-2012.

Brazilian municipalities and their own expenditures on health: some associations.

In a context that combines decentralization and underfunding of public health policy, Brazilian municipalities expressively extend their spending in this sector, allocating a proportion of their own revenues (direct taxation added to the mandatory intergovernmental transfers from the Union and the states) at levels above the ones that are constitutionally determined. However, there have been incipient studies investigating the expenditure composition on health in these federative units, in order to describe its main characteristics and explanations. In order to contribute to eliminating this gap, this article explores some associations between attributes of the municipalities (population size, region of the country, the proportion of older adults, child mortality, hiring private services and SUS transfer) and health expenditure implemented with the municipalities' own recipes.