Do Brazilian states engage in the fiscal war of ports? An empiric study of tax competition and an analysis of a natural experiment: the Brazilian senate resolution 13/2012

• Autor(a) principal: Maluf Júnior, João
• Data de Publicação: 2015
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional do FGV (FGV Repositório Digital)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10438/15089
• topic: Tributação; Competição fiscal; Benefícios fiscais; Economia; Finanças públicas; Imposto sobre circulação de mercadorias e serviços; Impostos - Brasil; Portos - Brasil; Econometria

The end of the year 2014 marked the second anniversary of the Brazilian Senate Resolution 13/2012 (R13). Briefly, R13 is a Senate act aimed to put an end to the so-called Fiscal War of Ports (FWP), a tax competition among states that takes place by giving tax breaks over interstate operations with importing goods in order to attract importing companies to their territories. R13 has reduced the taxation level over such operations expecting to decrease profits that could be extracted from them and firms willingness to join such special tax break regimes. Nonetheless, R13 has left a great discussion on whether or not the benefits of investments attracted to a particular state exceed the costs to that state of giving up tax revenues by the concession of FWP tax benefits. Our objective at this work is to give a contribution to that discussion by testing whether a strategic interaction behavior among states, such as the one allegedly occurring in the FWP, in fact emerges from the importing sector figures collected from January/2010 through April/2015, and by testing whether R13 has indeed impacted such strategic interaction behavior. We use a model of spatial econometrics, specifying a weights matrix that aggregates the level of imports in competing jurisdictions. In addition, we estimate our equation using a fixed effect panel approach. The results suggest the existence of a strategic interaction behavior among states and the existence of a R13 impact on such interaction behavior.