What is Argentine public spending allocated to? To answer this question, we must look at the budget, known as the law of laws, which contains the revenue projections and spending authorizations that the legislative branch grants to the executive branch. When perceived revenues exceed initial projections, the chief of staff can expand the budget by indicating the purpose to which the new funds will be directed.
Each level of government -- national, provincial, and municipal -- defines its own revenue and spending scheme. Understanding the distribution of the budget, its functionality, in which geographic area of the country it is applied, and how much of what was planned is actually executed allows us to understand the priorities of the officials in charge. Furthermore, knowing which level of government is responsible for spending on a particular function allows us to better assign responsibility for its good or poor performance and understand the division of tasks among the different governments.
At Infodash we present a dashboard that takes official data from the Ministry of Economy and, through various visualizations, allows you to explore what the national, provincial, and municipal budgets are allocated to, their execution, and their evolution over time.
The joint analysis of the different levels of government, combined with GDP statistics at the provincial level, allows us to easily analyze data that is not readily accessible. For example, we observe that the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires and La Pampa have a similar spending value as a proportion of their total GDP (41.3% and 40.9%, respectively). However, in the national capital, that spending is mostly carried out by the national government (33.7%), while in La Pampa a greater proportion is carried out by the provincial government (27.6%). On the other hand, in the "Consolidated Public Spending Evolution" section, we observe that national spending equals 21.3% of GDP and provincial spending 16.3%, accumulating 38% between the two levels of government. However, when we filter certain functions such as "education" or "health," we observe that the majority of spending is carried out by the provinces.
