The Brazilian Rouanet Law - sponsorship transactions from 2010 to 2014

This dataset contains structured information on cultural projects funded under Brazil’s National Program for Cultural Support (Programa Nacional de Apoio à Cultura, commonly known as Lei Rouanet). The data were originally obtained from publicly available government sources under Brazil’s Information Access Law (Lei de Acesso à Informação), including the Versalic platform and the Brazilian open data portal.

The dataset comprises 106,804 observations and 19 variables, integrating information at both the project level and the sponsor level. Each record corresponds to a sponsorship entry associated with a specific cultural project.

The variables can be grouped as follows:

• Sponsor information: includes the sponsor’s name (SPO_NAME), identification code (SPO_CODE), and type (SPO_TYPE), which distinguishes between individuals (PF) and companies (PJ). It also includes the amount of subsidy allocated to the sponsor (SPO_SUBSIDY) and the year of the transaction (SPO_YEAR).
• Location variables: include the sponsor’s city (SPO_CITY) and state (SPO_STATE), as well as a macro-regional variable (STA_REGIAO) indicating one of Brazil’s five major regions to which the project’s state belongs.
• Project information: includes the project identifier (PRO_ID), project name (PRO_NAME), responsible agent (PRO_AGENT), and project location (PRO_STATE).
• Financial information: includes the amount of subsidy requested (PRO_SUBSIDY_REQUESTED), approved (PRO_SUBSIDY_APPROVED), and effectively received (PRO_SUBSIDY_RECEIVED).
• Cultural classification variables: include the cultural segment (PRO_SEGMENT), the cultural area in English (PRO_AREA_EN) and its corresponding code (PRO_AREA_CODE), as well as the segment identifier (SEG_ID).

The dataset has been cleaned and structured to ensure consistency across variables, although a small number of missing values remain in selected fields (e.g., SPO_TYPE, PRO_AGENT). Numeric variables are provided in standard floating-point or integer formats, while categorical and textual information are encoded as strings.

This curated version of the dataset was used for the empirical analysis presented in the associated study. To ensure transparency and reproducibility, the processed dataset is made publicly available via Zenodo.

Data Sources

The raw data analysed in this study are publicly available under Brazil’s Information Access Law (Lei de Acesso à Informação) at:
http://versalic.cultura.gov.br/

Structured data can also be accessed via the Brazilian Open Data Portal:
https://dados.gov.br/dados/conjuntos-dados/projetos-do-programa-nacional-de-apoio-a-cultura-lei-rouanet