Comparing the Incidence of Taxes and Social Spending in Brazil and the United States
Comparing the Incidence of Taxes and Social Spending in Brazil and the United States Sean Higgins, Nora Lustig, Whitney Ruble, and Timothy Smeeding Abstract We perform the first comprehensive fiscal incidence analyses in Brazil and the US, including direct cash and food transfers, targeted housing and heating subsidies, public spending on education and health, and personal income, payroll, corporate income, property, and expenditure taxes. In both countries, primary spending is close to 40 percent of GDP. The US achieves higher redistribution through direct taxes and transfers, primarily due to underutilization of the personal income tax in Brazil and the fact that Brazil’s highly progressive cash and food transfer programs are small while larger transfer programs are less progressive. However, when health and non-tertiary education spending are added to income using the government cost approach, the two countries achieve similar levels of redistribution. This result may be a reflection of better-off households in Brazil opting out of public services due to quality concerns rather than a result of government effort to make spending more equitable. JEL Codes: D31, H22, I38 Keywords: inequality, fiscal policy, taxation, social spending. Working Paper 360 www.cgdev.org March 2014 Comparing the Incidence of Taxes and Social Spending in Brazil and the United States Sean Higgins Tulane University Nora Lustig Tulane University Center for Global Development Inter-American Dialogue Whitney Ruble Tulane University Timothy Smeeding University of Wisconsin The authors are grateful to Luis Felipe López-Calva for providing very helpful comments as discussant of an earlier version of this paper, to seminar participants for useful comments and suggestions, to Claudiney Pereira for collaboration on the Brazil analysis, to Grant Driessen for collaboration on the US analysis, and to Adam Ratzlaff and David Roberts for research assistance.
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