A Universal Basic Income For Brazil: Fiscal and Distributional Effects of Alternative Schemes

Abstract

The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic has led to an increasing interest in Universal Basic Income (UBI) proposals as it exposed the inadequacy of traditional welfare systems to provide basic financial security to a large share of the population. In this paper, we use a static tax-benefit microsimulation model to analyse the fiscal and distributional effects of the hypothetical implementation in Brazil of alternative UBI schemes which partially replace the existing tax-transfer system. The results indicate that the introduction of a UBI/Flat Tax system in the country could be both extremely effective in reducing poverty and inequality and economically viable.