Brazil rates worst for public expenditures

A couple weeks ago, an organization called the Brazilian Institution for Tax Planning (IBPT) released the results of its 30-country survey, which measured the return that citizens get for the money they are taxed. Brazil, as you may know, has an impressively high tax rate for a developing country at 34.4%, significantly higher than that of the US and the highest in the Americas. For that reason, and also because the group is probably an anti-tax group of some sort (no time to look it up now!), it should be no surprise that Brazil came in dead last. The survey included neighbors Argentina and Uruguay. Notably, it doesn't seem to include too many other low-income countries, which I take as a sign that this is an anti-tax group that wanted the data to show Brazil in last place. Be that as it may, it is still an effectively dramatic way of highlighting Brazil's inefficiency.

The same story repeats itself in microcosm when you look into specific areas of public services in Brazil. You can fill in the blank in the sentence below with almost anything (education, health, security):

Brazil lags in ________, despite the fact that it spends more as a percentage of GDP than comparable developing countries.

As a result, Brazilians pay either one time (taxes) and get a bad deal, or if they have a high enough income, they pay a second time to buy private education, health and security that actual works.

Though there are no shortage of academics and newspapers and other organizations that insist that the time to change these policies and make them fairer is now, the typical Brazilian on the street isn't likely to protest over these issues. Taxes are often hidden, especially in the prices of manufactured goods, which may be part of the reason that organizations have to work so hard to get the issue of taxes and inefficiency in the news (especially comparing with the United States, which, despite being rated as very efficient, has to content with a large swath of the population that thinks that any tax at all is akin to tyranny, no matter how well spent).

In a lame reply on Globo News, the government argued that the results didn't take into account the effect of social spending like Bolsa Familia.

You can find some more interesting information from IBPT here.