This dissertation aimed to present and analyze the financing of social assistance policy in the Argentine and Brazilian federations from 2003 to 2015, highlighting the social assistance services and direct income transfers. It also sought to explore possible effects of different equity financing mechanisms on policy delivery. For this, the focus of the comparison between the two countries was fiscal centralism in the social assistance policy, captured from its two dimensions: jurisdictional and spending. The assumption adopted is that federative arrangements with greater fiscal centralism, that is, with greater Union participation in financing regulation and public policy spending, may favor its more equitable supply throughout the national territory. The methodological strategy was the technique of case studies involving the comparison of two South American federal democracies. For this, a bibliographic review, legislation analysis and secondary data were used, obtained through databases made available on governmental open access portals on the Internet. The main conclusion is that social assistance in Argentina and Brazil has a similar trajectory in terms of the positive evolution of spending between 2003 and 2015, with emphasis on non-contributory pensions and conditional cash transfer programs. However, they differ in spending, decentralization of competencies and jurisdictional centralization of social assistance services.
This article proposes an evolutionary study of a basic institution in regional educational administration within the boundary of the Autonomous Region of Andalusia, The Education Council, within the first stage of its coming into operation. It started with a set up which was typical of the beginning of decentralization derived from the autonomous State and it was characterized by the scarcity of attributions, by how provisional it was and by the effort to endow the Andalusian government with certain importance, until the end of a period that was marked by a reform of the Spanish educational system (LOGSE), with evident administrative and organizational consequences in all the autonomous regions. During the period studied (1982-1990) the Council is ruled by a model of functional “departmenting”, where activities are grouped according to the fundamental duties to be carried out in order to achieve the proposed objectives.