TAX LITERACY, STATE CAPACITY AND DEVELOPMENT: EDUCATION AS INSTITUTIONAL MEDIATION IN BRAZIL

Resumo

This article examines how tax and social security literacy can operate as an educational mediation mechanism to strengthen state capacity and institutional development. While the literature on state capacity emphasizes administrative, fiscal, and legal dimensions, it has largely overlooked the cognitive conditions that sustain legitimacy, compliance, and cooperation. Addressing this gap, the study adopts a qualitative theoretical approach, combining a structured narrative review with integrative conceptual reconstruction across four domains: state capacity theory, institutional economics, legitimacy theory, and literacy studies. The article advances the concept of institutional intelligibility, defined as the socially distributed capacity to understand and evaluate institutional arrangements, particularly those related to taxation and social protection. Building on this concept, it proposes a cumulative analytical framework linking education, intelligibility, legitimacy, cooperation, state capacity, and development. The analysis argues that cognitive conditions are not merely complementary, but constitutive of sustainable institutional performance. The Brazilian case is used as an illustrative context, characterized by a relatively high tax burden, strong reliance on indirect taxation, regulatory complexity, and persistent informality. These features generate epistemic asymmetries that weaken fiscal legitimacy and institutional trust, highlighting the relevance of literacy as a policy instrument. The study contributes to the literature by expanding the concept of state capacity to include a cognitive dimension and by repositioning education as a form of institutional infrastructure. It also opens avenues for empirical and comparative research on the relationship between institutional intelligibility, compliance, and development outcomes.