The Taxation of Everyday Life in Nineteenth-Century Brazil: Municipal Tax Codes, Public Services, and Socioeconomic Development

This paper is part of a larger project on the history of municipal finance and the provision of public services in São Paulo, Brazil during the first century of independence from Portugal, 1822-1930.  Municipalities formed the basic building block of the Brazilian state, bearing primary responsibility for providing public services to its citizens.  Next to direct sources of family income, public services like health, education, safety, water and sewer systems, and infrastructure have constituted the single greatest determinant of welfare in modern societies. Inadequate or unevenly distributed public services in twentieth-century Brazil promoted what a sociologist termed the “cycle of cumulative disadvantage,” where poverty, malnutrition, disease, and illiteracy broadened the gap between rich and poor across generations. The study of municipal finance and the provision of public services, then, contribute to our understanding of the roots and perpetuation of inequality. 

We know that municipal public services were funded almost entirely out of local revenues in the nineteenth century and that revenues sources were almost always inadequate to meet the needs of expanding townships and growing populations.  Revenue sources were detailed in fee schedules and tax codes of local municipal ordinances. Using these ordinances I construct a profile of the taxpayer to understand the weight of the fiscal burden to fund public services on municipal citizens in nineteenth century Brazil.  What did the residents pay taxes on and what did they get in return?  How heavy a fiscal burden did they shoulder?  Was it the municipality’s inability to improve revenue generation due to an inordinately heavy tax burden or to the types of the revenue sources that it had at its disposal?  The taxpayer profile takes an economic history approach to everyday life that contributes to our understanding of nineteenth century socioeconomic development.