Ministerial spending on foreign policy has three distinct sources: the Annual Budget Law (LOA), the Federal Court of Auditors (TCU) and the Transparency Portal. We have selected the TCU data below because it provides the longest complete time series of federal spending.

The central idea of this data is to add up federal government spending abroad, returning the approximate amount of total annual Brazilian spending, quantifying the mobilization of national resources for the country’s international insertion.

In the TCU data, available since 2008, we used the “sub-function” column to filter spending abroad, selecting three sub-functions analogous to foreign policy: “foreign trade”, “diplomatic relations” and “international cooperation”.