Alves Branco Tariff

Alves Branco Tariff (1844), Brazil's first post-Independence tariff reform. Named for the finance minister of the time, the tariff raised import duties from an across-the-board rate of 15 percent ad valorem to 20 percent for cotton textiles and 30 percent for most other goods. Duties for a few agricultural products such as tobacco, tea, and hemp were set at 40 to 60 percent. The tariff was enacted after negotiations to renew the Anglo-Brazilian commercial treaty of 1827 became entangled in diplomatic disputes over Brazil's failure to halt the slave trade and Britain's refusal to lower duties on Brazilian sugar and coffee. Sometimes described as protectionist, the tariff was chiefly a fiscal measure intended to increase government revenues, which came overwhelmingly from customs receipts. Falling short of the more consistently protectionist proposals made in 1843 by a parliamentary commission, it had scarcely any adverse effects on British trade with Brazil. More important for the development of domestic industry was an 1846 decree eliminating all taxes on imported machinery.

As a result of both the 1844 increase in tariffs and the general growth in foreign trade, government revenues nearly doubled between 1845 and 1855. An even more liberal tariff schedule superseded the Alves Branco tariff in 1857.

See alsoSlave Trade, Abolition of: Brazil.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Nícia Vilela Luz, A luta pela industrialização do Brasil (1961).

Leslie Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade: Britian, Brazil, and the Slave Trade Question, 1807–1869 (1970).

Additional Bibliography

Rivière, Peter. Absent-Minded Imperialism: Britain and the Expansion of Empire in Nineteenth-Century Brazil. London: Tauris Academic Studies, 1995.

                                          B. J. Barickman