Linking Promises to Policies: Law and Development in an Unequal Brazil

Coutinho Diogo R.

The Law and Development Review, 2010, vol. 3, issue 2, 3-40

Abstract: The 1988 Brazilian Constitution contains a wide variety of social and economic rights and expressly embraces development as a fundamental goal. For the results to be effective, however, constitutional provisions of this type require permanent implementation and articulation of public policies that, in turn, are intensely mediated by the law. Assuming that the legal dimension of social policies ultimately matters for development, the article seeks to identify and discuss the distributive effects caused by some Brazilian welfare institutions and their legal arrangements. After describing the regressive outcomes produced by the tax and pensions systems and arguing that such effects reinforce Brazilian's historically rooted deep inequality, the article discusses Programa Bolsa Família, a conditional cash transfer in Brazil, and presents the preliminary findings of an ongoing research project on law and development (the LANDS project).

Keywords: law and development; equality; redistribution; social policies; Brazil; Bolsa Família (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.2202/1943-3867.1055 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:lawdev:v:3:y:2010:i:2:n:2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/ldr/html

DOI: 10.2202/1943-3867.1055

Access Statistics for this article

The Law and Development Review is currently edited by Yong-Shik Lee

More articles in The Law and Development Review from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().