Economy

This report compiles comparable tax revenue statistics over the period 1990-2020 for 27 Latin American and Caribbean economies. Based on the OECD Revenue Statistics database, it applies the OECD methodology to countries in Latin America and the Caribbean to enable comparison of tax levels and tax structures on a consistent basis, both among the economies of the region and with other economies. This publication is jointly undertaken by the OECD Centre for Tax Policy and Administration, the OECD Development Centre, the Inter-American Center of Tax Administrations (CIAT), the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

As Brazil is significantly less integrated into international trade than other emerging market economies, opening up to trade has significant potential to create jobs that are more productive and better paid. At the same time, this will be associated with structural changes and adjustment costs. Some workers are required to move to more productive firms, change occupations, sectors or even location. In particular, low-skilled workers need to upgrade their skills to move into newly created medium-skilled jobs in expanding firms and sectors. Workers who stay in their jobs will face similar challenges as firms upgrade production processes towards more advanced technologies. Well-designed and well-funded training and adult education policies, combined with effective social protection and employment services, can go a long way to mitigate adjustment costs for low-skilled, unemployed and informal workers. Evidence suggests that training policies can make a real difference, provided that its content is aligned with skill demands in local labour markets. Moreover, the education system plays a fundamental role for preparing current and future generations for the challenges that international integration and rising digitalisation will bring about.

The recovery from the current deep recession caused by the COVID-19 pandemic will require raising productivity through structural reforms. This implies a number of challenges for economic policies. With large parts of the economy shielded from competition, firms face weak incentives to become more productive. Sizeable shares of labour and capital are trapped in low-productivity firms that survive on the back of support from distortive policies. Reallocation mechanisms such as continuous firm entry, exit or the growth of stronger firms on the expense of less productive ones appear weaker than elsewhere. Domestic regulatory burdens and market entry barriers are high, reducing domestic competitive pressures. External competition is hampered by high trade barriers that have precluded Brazil from the opportunities that an increasingly integrated world economy can offer. A fragmented tax system gives rise to one of the world’s highest tax compliance costs and a wide array of exemptions and special regimes reduces fairness and the redistribution effect of taxes. Financial markets used to be dominated by directed credit, but thanks to a successful policy reform that aligned directed lending rates with market rates, they are now undergoing a profound transformation. Challenges in contract enforcement suggest scope for changes in the organisation of the judiciary to reduce judicial uncertainty and reduce trial durations.

Brazil spends around 15% of GDP on different social benefits, but within these expenditures, different benefits have different social impacts. While the small conditional cash transfer programme Bolsa Família is well-targeted to the poor and has a strong diminishing effect on inequality, pension benefits largely reach those with above-median incomes. Over many years, and as a result of different indexation mechanisms, the real value of pension benefits has increased rapidly, while conditional cash transfers have struggled to keep pace with inflation. This paper presents a simulation experiment using household data to demonstrate the significant potential that changes in the annual benefit indexation mechanism of social security benefits could have had for reducing inequality. Maintaining the purchasing power of pension benefits while shifting the increased pension spending that resulted from automatic indexation towards conditional cash transfers would have allowed significantly stronger progress in reducing inequality. This strengthens the case for rethinking the current indexation mechanism of social security benefits in Brazil.

The COVID-19 crisis has had a profound impact on SME access to finance. In particular, the sudden drop in revenues created acute liquidity shortages, threatening the survival of many viable businesses. The report documents an increase in demand for bank lending in the first half of 2020, and a steady supply of credit thanks to government interventions. On the other hand, other sources of finance declined, in particular early-stage equity. This paper, a special edition of Financing SMEs and Entrepreneurs, focuses on the impacts of COVID-19 on SME access to finance, along with government policy responses. It reveals that the pre-crisis financing environment was broadly favourable for SMEs and entrepreneurs, who benefited from low interest rates, loose credit standards and an increasingly diverse offer of financing instruments. It documents the unprecedented scope and scale of the policy responses undertaken by governments world-wide, and details their key characteristics, and outlines the principal issues and policy challenges for the next phases of the pandemic, such as the over-indebtedness of SMEs and the need to continue to foster a diverse range of financing instruments for SMEs.

The design of intergovernmental fiscal relations can help to ensure that tax and spending powers are assigned in a way to promote sustainable and inclusive economic growth. Decentralisation can enable sub-central governments to provide better public services for households and firms, while it can also make intergovernmental frameworks more complex, harming equity. The challenges of fiscal federalism are multi-faceted and involve difficult trade-offs. This synthesis paper consolidates much of the OECD’s work on fiscal federalism over the past 15 years, with a particular focus on OECD Economic Surveys. The paper identifies a range of good practices on the design of country policies and institutions related strengthening fiscal capacity delineating responsibilities across evels of government and improving intergovernmental co-ordination.