FISCAL JUSTICE IN BRAZILIAN TAX REFORM: PROGRESSIVITY, REDISTRIBUTION AND IMPLEMENTATION CHALLENGES

Abstract

The study analyzes fiscal justice in the context of the Brazilian Tax Reform, taking as its temporal scope the promulgation of Constitutional Amendment No. 132/2023 and the initial implementation stage reached in 2026. It is a theoretical, qualitative, bibliographic and documentary study, developed from current legislation, official data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, the National Treasury and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, as well as scientific literature on ability to pay, regressivity, consumption taxation and fiscal federalism. The objective is to examine to what extent the new tax framework incorporates mechanisms of progressivity and redistribution and which administrative challenges condition their effectiveness. The results reveal a relevant normative shift: the Constitution now expressly refers to tax justice and the mitigation of regressivity; consumption taxation incorporates cashback for low-income families, a zero rate for the national basic food basket and destination-based taxation; and income taxation, from 2026, combines tax reductions for lower income brackets with minimum taxation of high incomes. The study concludes that the reform expands the legal instruments of fiscal justice, but its definitive distributive effects still depend on implementation, data integration, federative coordination and continuous empirical evaluation.