Tax reform in Brazil:an evaluation at the crossroads

Tax reform has been a central issue of the Brazilian economic debate for at least a decade. But despite the supposedly reformist resolution of several governments, very little was in fact achieved. The idea of reforming the country’s indirect taxation system is, once again, in the forefront of the government’s agenda. The complexity of Brazil’s fiscal federalism has been often and rightly mentioned as a major difficulty to the advancement of the tax reform. This paper tries to look beyond fiscal federalism and focus on difficulties of a different kind, that have to do with the sheer magnitude of the reform and the uneven sectoral distribution of the indirect-tax burden in the country. After an initial section providing a brief historical and institutional background, section B discusses the various tax-reform attempts that took place since 1997, and draws useful insights for the analysis of the political economy of the taxreform deadlock. Sections C and D look into indirect taxation in Brazil, calling attention to challenges entailed by the scale of the intended reform and the uneven sectoral distribution of the tax burden. The political economy of the involved difficulties is discussed in section E. Concluding remarks are presented in section F.

Tax reform on the brink of fiscal dominance: a political economy model

With an overindebted public-sector, Brazil has been on the brink of a fiscal dominance problem for quite a long time. The term has been usually associated to a situation in which monetary policy becomes subordinated to fiscal needs. This paper calls attention to broader implications of prolonged exposure to impending fiscal dominance. A highdebt environment may make perfectly reasonable fiscal-reform initiatives seem extremely risky. Without any room to absorb revenue losses, in a complex fiscalfederalism arrangement, the government is bound to recurrently see badly needed tax reform, which could lead to a much less distorting tax system, as an unaffordable adventure. The paper is structured in the following way. The next section presents stylized facts that have been underlying a whole decade of unsuccessful tax-reform attempts in Brazil. Section 3 shows how the combination of those facts creates very unfavorable conditions for the approval of the kind of tax reform the country needs. A simple political economy model is developed in section 4. Simulations based on the model are analyzed in sections 5 and 6. Concluding remarks are presented in the last section.tax reform, public debt, fiscal dominance, political economy, federalism, Brazil

Fiscal impulse in the Brazilian economy

This paper develops an alternative indicator of fiscal policy which allows a more accurate picture of the underlying fiscal trend in the Brazilian economy over the recent period. This indicator corrects conventional fiscal-stance measures for the effects of theeconomic cycle, and yields a measure of the discretionary change in the budgetary position of the public-sector, known as the fiscal impulse. Section 2 briefly examines the evolution of traditional fiscal policy indicators over the recent period, detecting the bottom line of the changes in the fiscal stance. The details of the estimation of the fiscal impulse measure for the Brazilian economy are presented in Section 3. Section 4 concludes the paper with a reassessment of recent fiscal policy episodes, using the data generated in the previous section. The resulting fiscal-impulse measure indicates that, on average, the fiscal stance during 1989-96 was more expansionist than suggested by traditional fiscal policy indicators.

Public sector debt dynamics in Brazil

1. INTRODUCTION 2. POLICY MIX AND THE PUBLIC-SECTOR NET DEBT 3. SKELETONS IN THE CLOSET, PRIVATIZATION PROCEEDS AND SEIGNIORAGE 4. SIMULATING DEBT DYNAMICS 5. SENSITIVITY ANALYSIS 6. CONCLUDING REMARKS APPENDIX: THE SIMULATION MODEL

Privatização do setor elétrico: especificidades do caso brasileiro

1. INTRODUÇÃO 2. HIDRELETRICIDADE 3. O CARÁTER FEDERALISTA DA PRESENÇA ESTATAL NO SETOR ELÉTRICO 4. VIGOR DA EXPANSÃO DE DEMANDA 5. PECULIARIDADES DAS POSSIBILIDADES DE EXPANSÃO DA OFERTA 6. COMENTÁRIOS FINAIS

The Brazilian economy from Cardoso to Lula: An interim view

This chapter on the Brazilian economy after 1994 is of a somewhat different nature compared to those on the economy in earlier periods. It is more speculative than its predecessors and based on a more restricted range of bibliographical material, as there is less consolidated research work on the period. It is to stress the obvious that the essay is inevitably marred to a certain degree by the lack of a sufficiently long time perspective. But it was thought that the benefits of providing a provisional account of the more recent economic developments in Brazil far outstripped the costs. The Brazilian economic history from 1995 to 2004 was still dominated by efforts to stabilise the economy. The essay is structured around an analysis of the eventful macroeconomic policies followed during the period. Other aspects are also considered, but often only to allow a clearer picture of the evolution of macroeconomic policies and the constraints they had to face. At first, the main economic policy objective was to consolidate the results of the Real Plan and to make sure that the long high inflation experience was really over. But soon the need to put public accounts under control and to make a sizable external adjustment would become the main challenges to be faced. A major balance of payments crisis in early 1999 imposed much overdue drastic changes in economic policy. Further disturbances occurred in 2002, the last year of Cardoso’s second term, as financial markets reflected fears that economic policy could be reversed with the likely victory of the opposition presidential candidate, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. But, somewhat surprisingly, the new government opted for policies that by and large represented a continuation of the orthodox economic policies of its predecessor. In contrast with the previous fifteen years there was success, in spite of many difficulties. Advance in the stabilisation front required reforms and institutional building efforts that brought very important changes and a sound foundation for future economic expansion. But effective growth performance over the period continued to be mediocre: between 1994 and 2004 per capita GDP (gross domestic product) increased an average of only 0.9 percent yearly. Together with structural fiscal difficulties, low economic growth imposed strict constraints on policies seeking to alleviate the country’s severe social imbalanceseconomic history, stabilization, Brazil

Além da Estabilização: Desafios da Agenda Fiscal

With the external accounts problems reasonably solved, Brazil’s economic policy agenda is bound to be increasingly focused on fiscal issues. What makes the design of economic policy especially complex in this area is the fact that there are several superimposed and potentially conflicting fiscal agendas. The main challenge of the country’s economic policy over the coming years will be to successfully conciliate the multiple fiscal agendas that will have to be faced, in order to remodel and to resize the extraction and allocation of fiscal resources that already amount to 40 percent of GDP. The scope for economic growth and construction of a more equitable society will largely depend upon the degree of success the country’s political system will be able to show in its response to this challenge.Ajuste Fiscal, Reforma Fiscal, Reforma Tributária, Economia Política, Brasil