Policies·portugal_rmg_minimum_income_1996

Portugal RMG (Rendimento Mínimo Garantido) 1996

PRT·1996 – 1996·enacted 1996-06-29·PS minority (Guterres I)candidate

What the policy did

Lei 19-A/96 of 29 June 1996 created RMG — Portugal's first general means-tested minimum-income guarantee coupled with 'social-insertion contract'. Renamed RSI (Rendimento Social de Inserção) in 2003. Foundational extension of the Portuguese transfer state.

Policy-content fingerprint — what this policy moved, on which axes

Per invariant 3, reforms are scored by what they did on each channel-separated axis, not by the party that enacted them. This fingerprint is how the policy-match engine finds historical analogues.

intended

↑

transfer expansion

fiscal.transfer_expansion

Size of cash and near-cash transfer programmes (unemployment benefits, means-tested assistance, universal child benefits). Architecturally distinct from forced-saving schemes — see condition welfare_architecture.

increased · moderate

larger transfer footprint

New national minimum-income scheme with activation conditions.

Enacted by

portugal_guterres_ps_1995_2002

Empirical evidence — linked hypotheses

Explicit links are curated by the author. Inferred links are hypotheses in the library that test the same axes this policy moved — the framework's answer to "what does the data say about a policy like this?".

Large-scale universal or near-universal transfer programmes produce a three-order causal chain.

universal_transfer_programmes_labour_force_participation_declineinferred

viafiscal.transfer_expansion

partial — Prime-age LFP fell by ≥1.0pp in 2/5 cases (threshold for SUPPORTED: ≥3). First-order improved in 3/4 cases. Mixed: consistent with the spec's design-d…

partial

Universal single-payer healthcare systems (NHS, Canadian Medicare) produce lower per-capita healthcare expenditure with equal or better life-expectancy outcomes than the US multi-payer system.

single_payer_cost_outcome_comparisoninferred

viafiscal.transfer_expansion

supported_subset — cost test PASSES (USA per-capita PPP $10957 vs GBR/CAN mean $5663, ratio 1.93x > 1.5); single-payer matched-or-beat USA on 4/5 tested outcome…

supported

UK post-1945 Attlee reforms (NHS, nationalisation of coal/rail/steel, expanded public housing) delivered measurable improvements in life expectancy and child mortality without undermining subsequent 1950s-1960s growth.

uk_attlee_reforms_output_health_outcomesinferred

viafiscal.transfer_expansion

refuted — Only 0 of 3 primaries hold. Failed: life-expectancy, infant-mortality, 1950s growth. UK 1950s growth +1.69%/yr; LE gain +3.29y (peer-mean +4.45y); IMR…

refuted

Italy's Reddito di Cittadinanza (RdC, March 2019) reduced absolute-poverty headcount among low-income Italian households by at least 15% within three years (2019-2022) but produced no measurable improvement in employment-rate among working-age beneficiaries, identified off the synthetic-control gap with EU peers (ESP, GRC, PRT) lacking comparable means-tested guaranteed-minimum-income programmes pre-2020.

welfare_transfer_italy_reddito_cittadinanza_effectinferred

viafiscal.transfer_expansion

PARTIAL — mean_gap=+188.4, |gap|/pre_sd=4.3, p_perm=0.8 (gap below 0.5×pre_sd or placebo p≥0.10)

partial

The American Rescue Plan Act (March 2021) expansion of the Child Tax Credit to USD 3000-3600 per child with full refundability and monthly disbursement (July-December 2021) produced a measurable and immediate decline in monthly child-poverty rate of at least 4 percentage points (Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia time-series), with the credit's December 2021 expiration producing a corresponding immediate reversal — providing high-frequency event-window evidence on near-instantaneous cash-transfer-to-poverty mechanics.

welfare_transfer_us_arpa_expanded_ctc_2021inferred

viafiscal.transfer_expansion

WEAKENED - SPM child poverty fell 4.5pp and rebounded 7.2pp; monthly CPSP and parental-LFP gates are not loaded

refuted

Universal Basic Services provision (UK post-war, Nordic) delivers equivalent wellbeing outcomes to consumption-based equivalents at lower material-throughput levels.

ubs_material_throughput_efficiencyinferred

viafiscal.transfer_expansion

INCONCLUSIVE_DATA_PENDING — treatment 'ubs_indicator' has no within-country variation under country fixed effects

run pending

The labour-supply dis-employment elasticity of negative-income-tax (NIT) and earned-income-tax-credit (EITC) -style cash-transfer programmes is materially smaller than the canonical mid-1970s NIT- experiment headline estimates suggested.

friedman_negative_income_tax_labour_supply_smaller_than_predictedinferred

viafiscal.transfer_expansion

PARTIAL — ATT=+20.8, p=nan, N=53, treated_countries=1 (above α=0.10)

partial

Across US household-panel microdata 1980-2019, the marginal propensity to consume out of income shocks identified as permanent (lasting >5 years; e.g.

chicago_permanent_income_consumption_smoothing_microdatainferred

viafiscal.transfer_expansion

INCONCLUSIVE_DATA_PENDING — no outcome variable loaded; missing: ['academic:psid_cex_consumption_microdata', 'academic:psid_cex_consumption_microdata']

run pending

Similar historical policies

Ranked by axis-fingerprint overlap with this policy. Direction match bolded — those are the closest historical analogues. Shape of the match is what drives policy-outcome comparison, not the country or party label.

Ingreso Familiar de Emergencia (IFE) COVID transfer (2020)

Plan Jefes y Jefas de Hogar Desocupados 2002

Family Tax Benefit A/B introduction

AUS·2000