AN ANALYSIS OF THE MACROECONOMIC IMPACTS ON THE GDP OF THE BRAZILIAN SOCIAL POLICY FROM 2004 TO 2014

AN INTERPRETATION BASED ON KEYNES

Abstract

In The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), Keynes identified two main problems of a monetary economy of production: i) the difficulty of achieving full employment according to the classical conception of his time, and ii) the extreme inequality of income and wealth distribution. Throughout the 1930s, he developed economic policy proposals to be carried out with state support in order to generate full employment, produce an improvement in income distribution patterns, and attenuate economic cycles. In light of this theoretical perspective, this paper aims
to analyze the macroeconomic impacts on GDP of two social programs in force in Brazil in the period from 2004 to 2014, namely: the Benefício de Prestação Continuada (BPC) and the Programa Bolsa Família (PBF). To do so, we used the Vector Autoregressive Time Series (VAR) methodology. From the analysis of impulse response functions, the main results showed that the PBF positively impacted GDP, however, the BPC showed
no statistical significance in the impulse response functions, and little relevance in the decomposition of variance, thus presenting a less prominent result than the PBF.