FINANCIAL SERVICE OF MUNICIPALITIES IN COOPERATIVE TAX FEDERALISM: The Need for Federative Rebalancing through Tax Decentralization.
Financial Autonomy, tax decentralization, fiscal federalism, municipalities
The present dissertation focuses on investigating the phenomenon of the high financial dependence of municipalities on the tax revenue sharing system, as well as studying the repercussions caused for the exercise of the material powers conferred for the effectiveness of fundamental and social rights. It aims to understand, based on the mechanisms of cooperative fiscal federalism, the factors that compromise municipal development to achieve financial sufficiency through their own tax competencies and how revenue transfers help to eliminate existing social and economic inequalities. From the verification between the federative rules foreseen in the Federal Constitution of 1988 and the records of the changes in state structures, with the support of doctrine and financial statistical data obtained from databases on electronic sites, it was found the insufficiency of the own tax collection and the constant and growing need for transfers of income to fund the programmatic tasks for social welfare. All this verified through the measures of centralization of tax revenues in the legal sphere of the Union together with the measures of control of public spending that prevent the inflow of significant sums of public finances for the municipalities, revealing a real impasse to the exercise of municipal financial autonomy