Fiscal and tax history in republican Brazil (1889-2026): theories, institutional architecture and impacts

Abstract

This article reconstructs the trajectory of Brazilian fiscal and tax policies between 1889 and 2026, articulating three dimensions usually treated separately in the literature: the economic doctrines underpinning each policy, the institutional architecture operating it, and the economic and social impacts it produced. Its originality is threefold: it incorporates into the long-run periodisation the regulatory cycle opened by Constitutional Amendment 132/2023 and its 2025-2026 implementing legislation, not yet processed by economic historiography; it proposes reading the republican trajectory as the successive and incomplete construction of three state capacities — to collect, to measure and to constrain spending; and it submits to historical evidence the hypothesis that competition among subnational units is a structural constant of Brazilian federalism, changing instruments as institutional design changes. It concludes that Brazilian tax history is made of sedimentation rather than rupture, and that regressivity is its longest-lasting feature.