Reforma tributária: Impactos macroeconômicos e de bem-estar sobre a economia brasileira.

Abstract

The economic depression, which manifested itself most harshly in 2015 and 2016, has led to a fall in tax revenues, contrasting with high public spending, which only grows. As a result, public accounts deteriorated, prompting the approval of Constitutional Amendment 95/2016, which freezes public expenditures for 20 years, adjusted for inflation in the previous year, with a possibility of revision in the tenth year. Despite this, there have been debates about the need to introduce some tax reforms. The present study considers among these, a tax reform along the lines of PEC 293/2004 that the Congress has been negotiating in recent years, with the objective of measuring macroeconomic and welfare impacts on the Brazilian economy. For this, simulations will be made using a general equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents in a closed and government economy. The simulations will take into account several scenarios, which can be constructed through combinations of productivity gains and stagnation, absence and presence of the tax reform, and the absence and presence of the already approved Constitutional Amendment 95/2016, as well as its two scenarios being one for 10 years and the other for 20 years. In all, a total of 12 simulations were performed. The analysis of the results will be concentrated on the welfare variation of the agents of the economy, since this is, or at least is expected to be, the government's main objective in the elaboration of public policies, mainly in the long term, without giving up , however, from the reference to economic variables. The main results indicate that the tax reform is only justified in the presence of productivity growth, in which the welfare of the agents increases significantly. When there is stagnation, in any scenario, tax reform worsens the welfare of both agents. In addition, such a policy generates the growth of important economic variables in all possible scenarios, such as public and private investments, public and private consumption, tax revenue and output. Therefore, in the presence of productivity growth, the tax reform generates more consistent results from the economic point of view.