Ana María Morales Chacón
International Research Training Group 'Temporalities of Future in Latin America'
Dynamics of Aspiration and Anticipation
PhD Candidate
Project: "The Redistribution of Income through Tax Reforms in Latin America. The Cases of Uruguay and Costa Rica (2005-2018)"
Project: "The Redistribution of Income through Tax Reforms in Latin America. The Cases of Uruguay and Costa Rica (2005-2018)"
The present investigation studies in depth the sociopolitical factors that mediate the approval of tax policies, and the thus resulting tax structures of Latin American countries, each in its own specificity. With this, it seeks a greater understanding of the social and political processes that lead to the approval or not of certain tax reforms in terms of their progressivity, seeking in this way a better understanding of tax policy as an instrument capable of distributing income and reducing economic inequalities in Latin American countries in the future. Specifically, it is intended to give an explanation about the development over the years of the same subsector of public policy in two Latin American countries. I aim to understand why the tax system in Uruguay ushers a major change in 2006 (towards greater tax progressivity), and why, on the contrary, the tax structure in Costa Rica barely expresses small incremental changes, the subsequent relative stability of recent years, and a final tax reform in 2018 that reinforces the regressivity of the system. In short, the present research research seeks to answer the following question: From what causal mechanisms does the tax policy in Uruguay and Costa Rica develop and vary to a greater or lesser degree of progressivity?