Yup. It's actually remarkable to me that the Brazilian government continues to add these taxes that, last I checked, were highest in the world.
The original justification was that it would spur domestic manufacture of computers, consoles, laptops, etc.
Obviously that hasn't happened. All it's done is make anything involving computing ridiculously expensive.
I truly don't understand why there isn't democratic pressure to repeal the insane import duties on electronics. It's like most people in Brazil have just accepted that's how domestic prices are without really questioning it. I don't get it.
There was a time when I was trying to run an actual journalistic quality blog about gamedev, and I interviewed a bunch of people, some of them almost slipped out stuff, and one talked to me off the record, basically he claimed a certain Brazillian company that has a license from a certain japanese company to manufacture some 8-bit and 16-bit consoles, lobbyed very hard for the tax increases on imported consoles (something that didn't helped them, most of their income come from Karaoke machines now).
And later on I found out that a lot of employees of that certain brazillian company have connections with the government, for example one of them worked for that company and worked for BNDS, and while still in both of their payrolls went on a speaking tour to explain how the government was being great for the local game industry by offering loans at low cost for game companies... when I went to check, the game companies or had government friends, or family (for example one of the "game companies" the government helped, that never made a game, had the son of the president as shareholder).
I also once foolishly helped an "activist" that was promising to represent Brazillian gamers to lower the taxes, I even printed the logo of his campaign on my own company t-shirts and promo materials, and printed his logo on an Arcade machine I built.
After he got inside the government and the negotiations started, then he immediately proposed a tax cut only for physical stores, and massive tax increases for online stores, specially Steam, this made people investigate his life, and then find out he was shareholder of physical game stores... Thankfully his effort failed (thankfully because what he was proposing would make overall taxes higher instead of lower, also it would result in censorship of a bunch of stuff).
I wonder if this is the NES-clone company you're mentioning is the same one that also lobbied for imported cell-phones to be taxed harder, and of course tried to prevent Apple from selling the iPhone in Brazil by registering its trademark.
Same in tiny Uruguay, but it's even more preposterous to say that they're trying to protect or incentivize a local consumer electronics manufacturing industry.
As a thought experiment, you could take the concept of tariffs and apply it to an ever decreasing geographic area. Maybe my city should try to protect its jobs and industry and therefore levy a 100% tariff on goods made in other cities. Same for my neighborhood or city block.
Ultimately, it's also a tragically regressive tax. Wealthy families that regularly travel to Miami or New York don't suffer much from it -- they just buy their electronics there. They may even make some money by bringing some home and selling the goods for much more than they paid.
If you're poor and you need to buy a laptop or phone on your meager salary, you're screwed.
I grew up in Brazil near the border with Uruguay, and we’d always cross the border to buy our electronics at the duty free stores. It was massively cheaper than buying them in Brazil.
Are duty free stores only present in border areas?
Tariffs and taxes are an addiction. Extremely easy to implement, difficult to repeal. That money collected is being used by someone and they will fight to continue receiving it.
The original justification was that it would spur domestic manufacture of computers, consoles, laptops, etc.
Obviously that hasn't happened. All it's done is make anything involving computing ridiculously expensive.
I truly don't understand why there isn't democratic pressure to repeal the insane import duties on electronics. It's like most people in Brazil have just accepted that's how domestic prices are without really questioning it. I don't get it.