Tax burden, government expenditures and income distribution in Brazil

This article attempts to explain the seeming paradox of a country with a high tax burden and a continually concentrated distribution of income. By means of a structural quantile regression model we analyze the distributional impact of government expenditures on the Gini index, and it is shown that Brazil's redistribution expenditures has a relatively smaller impact for low quantiles of the conditional distribution of income inequality. It is also noted that both the country's tax and expenditure structure are, in part, responsible for the country's continuous concentration of income. (C) 2007 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. All rights reserved.