The study analyses whether the growing State Domestic Product (SDP) of Kerala since the latter half of the 1980s, has acted as a larger resource base for the State and finds that it has not. While the inability to fully tap the existing resource potential could be cited as a reason, the paper...

Existing research examining the self-selection of immigrants suffers from a lack of information on the immigrants’ labor force activities in the home country, quotas limiting who is allowed to enter the destination country, and non-economic factors such as internal civil strife in the...

It is critical to emphasize that intergovernmental fiscal relations must be thought of as a system and that all the pieces in the system must fit together if decentralization is to work properly. Various theories and experiences strongly suggest that if fiscal decentralization is to produce...

The Indian tax reform experience can provide useful lessons for many countries due to the largeness of the country with multilevel fiscal framework, uniqueness of the reform experience and difficulties in calibrating reforms due to institutional constraints. This paper details the evolution of...

The challenge to the tax system to expand both the revenue base and progressively bring into the net larger number of taxpayers remains as daunting as ever. The object is not to ignore the generally beneficial impact of deregulation and tax friendly measures in providing a more conducive...

The most popular technique for estimating tax elasticities is the “Proportional Adjustment†method. This paper shows that the standard methodology used will almost invariably lead to biased elasticity estimates, and proposes an alternative methodology which avoids this problem. [WP]

The Finances of the PRIs are looked into. The role of 13th Finance Commission is explained. Some ‘learnings’ from International experience is given.

Budget speech by finance minister of Karnataka

This week, the finance minister presents a statement to Parliament of how much money the central government expects to raise in the next financial year, and how it will spend that money. The budget speech is also used by the government to propose other policy measures. In this primer the paces...