WHILE BRAZILIAN PRESIDENT Jair Bolsonaro denies that a serious public health crisis is underway, a small municipality an hour up the coast from Rio de Janeiro has instituted a remarkable and effective COVID-19 response. In Maricá, a city of 160,000, about 42,000 of the city’s lowest-income residents-who already receive 130 reals (R$), about $25, per month as part of the city’s expanded basic income-are now being paid R$300 per month ($60), 169 percent of the Brazilian poverty line, at least through September. As the pandemic took hold, end-of-year bonuses were advanced to make April’s payment an even larger R$430 per person. Food baskets are also distributed each month to families with children in the public school system. More than 21,000 self-employed and informal-sector workers with low and moderate incomes are receiving R$1,045 each month, the Brazilian minimum salary, and further direct support is being offered to help small businesses keep workers on their payrolls in the absence of federal action. While the public health impacts of these policies are difficult to assess, other benefits are already clear. Between January and May, the city lost only 0.4 percent of its formal-sector jobs, while the state of Rio lost 5 percent. Meanwhile tax receipts increased in Maricá, in contrast to the sharp declines expected across the country. Numbers like these represent the difference between catastrophe and a level of stability required to overcome the crisis for tens of thousands of Maricá’s residents.
This set of initiatives represents the most ambitious city-level response to COVID-19 in Brazil, and one of the most notable in the world. That all of this is happening in a small suburban city on the outskirts of Rio might be surprising to those unfamiliar with the recent political history of the region. To observers of the self-designated City of Utopias, however, there is nothing unusual about the speed or scope of Maricá’s COVID-19 response. The sole municipality in the state of Rio de Janeiro governed by the leftleaning Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, or PT), for the last decade Maricá has benefitted remarkably from a stroke of geological fortune: its location next to the Campo de Lula, the most productive oil drilling site in Brazil.
Yet unlike the protagonists of countless prior commodity booms, the city has used its windfall to distinguish itself as Brazil’s premier municipal innovator, investing its oil proceeds in a remarkable suite of progressive social policies. In addition to the basic income program, which has more than 42,000 monthly recipients, initiatives include savings accounts for high school students, free public transportation, massive infrastructure investments, and a sovereign wealth fund to lower costs of capital and guarantee social programs in perpetuity.