Keila Corrêa Bittencourt

The Federal Internal Public Debt (FIPD) is one of very important issues of public finances in Brazil. Because its trajectory showed great fluctuation after 1994, when already realized the Plano Real, between 1994-2008 the FIPD increased from R$ 61 billion to R$ 1 trillion, respectively. Many were the attempts to explain presented, such as public deficit and interest rate showed by scholars. However, the main goal this research is just to demonstrate that the ascent of the FIPD is explained by public deficit and interest rate, but a small share, because the other share has not plausible justification, since it involves policy analysis and theoretical vision of implemented policies. For this, it uses in the research the Theory of Regulation Capture and of Functional Finance, because both have assumptions that explain the behavior of the Brazilian public debt from 1994 to 2008. The first theory links economic behavior and politic to demonstrate that market failures and regulation were not highly correlated, thus showing the capture of the legislature controlled by regulated institution. The second theory consider that the public finance is not balanced contradicting the theory of balanced budget or orthodox. Therefore, the Functional Finance can demonstrate that the policies are based on facts that it has another approach to and therefore will change the trajectory of the policies. Some divergences among the theories are: function of FIPD; issuing currency; and debt /GPD. From these theories, the research may show that the increased of FIPD is explain by the Central Bank (Banco Central do Brasil), moved by this regulated institutions and political grounds that the policies favor the financial sector. Thus, the research has a chapter for each indicator of increased of FIDP, a summary for each indicator and the general conclusion.