The purpose of this thesis is to conduct a legal-institutional analysis of the federal tax incentives that are intended to encourage regional development. In Part I we begin this work with a historical analysis of regional policies from the 1950s through the present, showing the transformations the regional issue has undergone and the complexity of the problem. After the historical analysis, we devote a chapter to the relationship between the law and the analysis of the effects of tax policies, the ideal of fiscal neutrality and the limitations of tax law scholars' treatment of the instrumental aspect (interventionist, redistributive, etc.) of tax law. Also in the second chapter we deal with regional development in the Brazilian Constitution of 1988 and the debate among economists regarding the use of tax incentives to achieve decentralized industrialization and regional development. In Part II we deepen our analysis of federal regional tax incentives, dealing with their interpretation by Brazilian courts, their incentive effects, the criteria used to select the businesses that benefit and the consideration required. In chapter IV we deal with lost tax revenue resulting from tax incentives, establishing certain comparisons with other losses and other important direct expenses in order to have an idea of their significance. In the fifth chapter we conduct an extensive analysis of the audits performed by the Federal Budget Oversight Board in order to grasp the manner in which these issues are monitored. Finally, in the last chapter, we deal with the analyses of socioeconomic effects produced institutionally.