Idiosyncrasies of intergenerational public transfers in Brazil

Cassio M. Turra, Centro de Desenvolvimento e Planejamento Regional (CEDEPLAR)
Bernardo L. Queiroz, Centro de Desenvolvimento e Planejamento Regional (CEDEPLAR)
Tatiana Pereira, Centro de Desenvolvimento e Planejamento Regional (CEDEPLAR)

In contemporary societies, intergenerational transfers play an important role in redistributing resources from the working age population to children and the elderly. Brazil is distinct for combining a relatively large public sector with a rapidly aging population and amidst some of the most extreme income inequalities in the world. Social insurance programs for the elderly dominate public transfers in Brazil, while children’s well-being depends largely on the private allocation of resources. In this paper, we take advantage of the estimates provided by the National Transfer Accounts Project to draw attention to some of the idiosyncrasies of intergenerational transfers in Brazil, and conjecture on how some dependent groups have been privileged over the last decades. Recognizing that most of these issues can only be addressed with historical data, we propose the construction of historical estimates of public transfers to cast light on some of the hypotheses for such typical patterns of reallocations in Brazil.