Multiplicadores fiscais de gastos e tributos: uma abordagem DSGE para a economia brasileira

Abstract

The present work aims to primarily study the Brazilian fiscal policy impact on the economic activity via disaggregated fiscal multipliers and secondarily verify if the fiscal policy behavior is anticyclical, acyclical or procyclical. To do so, it estimates with Bayesian techniques a DSGE model with a rich fiscal toolkit of expenditures and taxes disaggregated into public consumption, public investment, transfers and tax rates on consumption, labor income and capital income. Specially, it uses two different databases of effective tax rates, which are the tax data that represent the model's tax rates in the most reliable way and have not yet been used in the national literature. The results show that, in all the time horizons, the public investment multiplier is the greatest, while the transfers one is the smallest, and that the Brazilian fiscal policy is, in general, procyclical, contributing to amplify the business cycle. Thus, the multipliers indicate that, from the perspective of the economic activity preservation, a fiscal adjustment should avoid cuts in public investment, as well as support the interpretation that the fiscal policy efficacy decrease in 2010-11 was due to the public investment loss of space in the relative composition of the fiscal stimuli. One of the sensibility exercises reveal that the fiscal multipliers are higher when the fiscal policy is procyclical, shedding light on the question not explored in the literature of the effect of the fiscal behavior (anticyclical, acyclical or procyclical) on the fiscal multipliers and pointing out that studies about economies characterized by procyclical fiscal policies, like the Brazilian one, that do not take into account this fiscal behavior tend to underestimate the multipliers. Furthermore, the model highlights which are the fiscal instruments that help the most to stabilize the public debt and how the procyclical behavior magnifies the effects of the Brazilian fiscal policy at the expense of a rising public debt, which later to be stabilized requires an enduring fiscal tightening which affects negatively the output. It also reveals that the fiscal shocks are responsible for explaining a relevant fraction of the variability in the output growth, primary surplus-output ratio and public debt-output ratio.