The Rio de Janeiro municipality of Maricá, located in the metropolitan region of Rio de Janeiro, is celebrating this month of June ten years of circulation of its social currency, Mumbuca. The coin was named after one of the main rivers in the municipality and also after a local neighborhood. A municipal decree instituted the Basic Income of Citizenship (RBC) program, inserted in a set of public policies of solidary economy and fight against poverty. The currency has parity with the real, that is, each mumbuca is equivalent to R$ 1. It emerged from the concept of circular economy, with appreciation of trade and local services and a policy of income generation and distribution for the population . Maricá was the first city in Brazil to have the social currency fully digitized, without the use of paper money. Among the policies implemented by the municipality that remain today, the creation of the popular Mumbuca bank and the social currency Mumbuca Indígena, which serves 150 indigenous people from two villages in the city, stand out. Another benefit thought at the time and which the municipal government is implementing now is Mumbuca Futuro, which works with children and adolescents who are students of the municipal network and who are part of solidarity economy incubators, as the Secretary for Solidarity Economy of Maricá explained to Agência Brasil. , Adalton Mendonca. Benefits Social currency is accepted in more than 13,000 establishments in Maricá – Elsson Campos/Marica City Hall According to the secretary, the municipality now has several types of benefits for citizens. The social currency, for example, now totals 80,000 current accounts and 13,000 registered establishments. Mendonça says that the Citizenship Basic Income Program (RBC), the first implemented in the city, has 42,500 beneficiaries. Each member of the family receives 200 mumbucas per month. The Worker Protection Program (PPT) allocates 650 mumbucas per month to 15,000 self-employed workers and individual micro-entrepreneurs (MEIs), the same amount paid to 6,000 direct and indirect municipal employees, as food allowance in Mumbuca currency , as well as Christmas aid for the purchase of basic food baskets at Christmas. “We have other aid and other forms of solidarity such as, for example, the recently created Aid Program for Animal Breeders and Protectors, affectionately known as MumbuCão; the Women’s Secretariat, with monetary aid for women victims of violence in the city”. Another program that will be implemented is MumbuCar, aimed at taxi drivers, motorcycle taxi drivers and couriers. Other programs, such as the Recomeço Aid, are activated at specific times. In 2022, due to a flood in April, the program helped around 3,000 people who lost furniture and appliances as a result of the rains, with values of up to 5,000 mumbucas. The program can be activated again in case of new climatic accidents. Financial movement The purpose of the social currency is to encourage local commerce and economy – Elsson Campos/Marica City Hall years. The secretary highlighted that during the covid-19 pandemic, the injection of resources circulating obligatorily only in the territory of the municipality, through the Mumbuca currency, helped in the generation of jobs. From January to June 2020, Maricá registered an increase of 0.28% in formal vacancies, according to the General Register of Employed and Unemployed (Caged) of the Ministry of Labor, and in June alone, there were 150 admissions more than dismissals . “Today, we take this as a fact: the municipality that carries out local development with a social currency, develops as a whole”, he pointed out. The secretary’s expectation is that, to the amount of R$ 1 billion injected into the economy by the Mumbuca currency, in 2024, around R$ 1.5 billion will be added from the municipality’s Sovereign Fund, which is the amount stipulated by the city hall. The initiative of the Rio de Janeiro municipality served as an inspiration for the creation of social currencies in other Rio de Janeiro municipalities, including Niterói, which launched Arariboia; Cabo Frio with the Itajuru coin; Porziuncula with Elephantine; Itaboraí, with Pedra Bonita; besides Saquarema, with Saquá. Petrópolis is the newest city in the state of Rio de Janeiro to have a social currency, the Ipê Amarelo, created by Law 8,494, now in force. Promotion For the director of the Getulio Vargas Social Foundation (FGV-Social), Marcelo Néri, the experience of the social currency of Maricá is structured on top of a rich municipality, which receives oil royalties, which makes it possible to experiment with differentiated public services. To Agência Brasil, he said that in the case of social currency, the great gain is in the sense of internalizing the main economic effects of payments made in local commerce: “when you give social currency, you favor local commerce and also the worker , which will waste resources. So, somehow, you generate a multiplier of expenses that is more concentrated within the municipality of Maricá.” The fundamental idea of social currencies is to encourage economic activity within the municipality, pointed out the economist. In general, Marcelo Néri considered that municipalities that have social currencies reduce the flow of income to other cities, which results in benefits for local trade and services, through the internalization of this economic circuit.
Agência Brasil
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