Abstract

This paper presents a methodology to decompose the net interest payments of the Brazilian government in five items: real-interest payments, inflation adjustment, exchange-rate swaps, financial cost of the government’s portfolio and second-order effects. The paper also presents an alternative methodology in which seigniorage is added to the initial list. The Brazilian data show important changes in the composition of the net interest paid in the last 15 years, with a reduction in real-interest payments in 2009-15, and an increase since then. The data also show that the financial cost of the government’s portfolio grew substantially since 2006, due to the accumulation of international reserves by the Central Bank and the government’s loans to its national development bank (BNDES). 

JEL Classification: H60; N16; E40.