O Programa Bolsa Família e a desigualdade social no Brasil: o efeito multiplicador do programa na renda familiar, no consumo e nas economias locais

Abstract

This study aims to evidence the universal basic income importance against the inequality escalation in Brazil. In the text’s development, the world’s contemporary capitalist crisis configuration factors are verified in accordance with a production model which is incompatible with a State guaranteed social rights. This is a bibliographic and documentary research, which evidences the restrictions in the budgets of social policies in Brazil, subjected to financial logic and with a growing public services unfunding. This framework is in line with the neoliberal ideology which privileges rentiers to the detriment of providing social wealth flow towards large portions of the population. The Brazilian State’s role within 2014 and 2019 was problematized in this research, gathering evidences which show that in Brazil austerity produced a profound counter-reform in the Social State set by the Federal Constitution of 1988. The study presents, in a critical approach, the policy of fiscal adjustment and favoring in the conduct of financial capital interests, while pointing out the public policies budget restrictions, primarily in regard to social policies. The promulgation of the constitutional amendment to the Public Spending Limited - EC 95/2016 is criticized for it is a social investments contention and reduction tool that further intensified social inequality. Within this perspective, this research contemplates the National Social Assistance Policy abudgetary analysis and its performance through the Bolsa Família Program under the neoliberal agenda’s dictate. The research identifies this program’s impacts on population segments living in poverty showing evidence that while transfering monetary resource as the complement or only source of income for the program’s beneficiaries, the Brazilian cities development is fomented, cities that are mostly marked by sharp income distribution inequality. The result of the analysis indicates the important strategy of social policies in the fight against poverty and its deleterious effects on the life of the working class. This picture results from measures adopted on the pretext of fiscal austerity, disarticulating the Social State established by the Citizen Constitution. The income transfer policy’s role and its contribution to coping with poverty due to the Multiplier Effect of social transfers as a driving mechanism in local economies, and through the immediate consumption of food and durable goods by beneficiaries is evidenced. In addition, it increases regional productive activity and, consequently, reflects positively on GDP growth. Based on official sources of data and demographic, socioeconomic indicators (income, family budget, employment and unemployment, users of programs and social benefits) and the public budget, the work was guided by the GINI coefficient to conclude that the Bolsa Família Program, even with limited resources, contributes to an improvement in the living conditions of the program’s participants