Suchergebnisse

What kept the Goods and Services Tax (GST) from becoming a reality in India for a quarter of a century after the adoption of the structural adjustment programme in 1991? What made it possible in 2016? To what extent the Indian model of GST reflects a compromise between the need to keep fiscal federalism intact and to respond to a more global economic impera-tive? To what extent India's transition to a concurrent dual GST has brought about a change in the principles, rules, frameworks, and institutions guiding intergovernmental fiscal interactions? This paper investigates these issues and shows that the shifts in the indirect tax regime in India since independence have taken place within the structural context of constitutional rules, the economic policy paradigm and political dynamics. Party congruence after 2014 helped to facilitate the introduction of the GST, but the shape thereof was strongly marked by path-dependent logics and the role of state governments as institutional veto players. In addition, the paper examines the ways in which India's transition to a concurrent dual GST has brought about a fundamental change in the principles, rules, frameworks, and institutions guiding intergovernmental fiscal interactions.

This paper links the foreign economic engagement of India's states with the literature on federalism, thereby contributing to an understanding of the political economy of FDI inflows in a parliamentary federal system. More specifically, it studies subnational governments' international engagements to attract foreign direct investment (FDI) and investigates whether the political affiliations of states' chief ministers and parliamentarians determine the spatial distribution of FDI across the Indian states, correcting for the influence of per capita income, population density, urbanisation, infrastructure, policy regime, and human development. Although the central government plays no direct role in determining the state to which FDI goes, the centre-state relations in a federal structure play a role in creating perceptions about the relative political risk involved in different investment destinations. Employing multiple linear regressions to analyse time-series (2000-2013) cross-sectional (12 states) data using the panel procedure, the study finds that affiliated states attract relatively more FDI per capita in comparison to states ruled by opposition parties or coalition partners. However, some exceptions do result, primarily due to two phenomena: first, the presence of a strong state leadership and, second, the presence of a significant share of members of parliament belonging to the prime minister's party in the non-affiliated states. Further, states ruled by outside supporters have been most successful in attracting FDI inflows during the coalition period.

Despite the extensive literature on distributive politics, we still lack a theory of how political and fiscal institutions interact to shape the pork-barrelling ability of national leaders in a federal parliamentary democracy. Focusing on party system attributes and governmental incentives attached to different types of discretionary grants, this article examines the extent to which a shift in the priorities and interests of the prime minister's party - effected by the change from a dominant-party system to a multiparty-coalition system - is responsible for the change in the dynamics of distributive policies. I use a rich panel dataset on Indian states to propose a situational theory of distributive politics which states that incentives for exclusive targeting of affiliated states in dominant-party systems drive national ruling parties towards particularism, while the shrinking opportunity to indulge in such a policy in multiparty-coalition systems creates a universalisation effect. Additionally, the disaggregated analysis of discretionary grants brings to the fore the fact that the shift from particularism to universalism occurs for schematic grants, which provide an opportunity for credit-claiming. The ad hoc grants, which are like side payments, remain subject to particularism.

This paper argues that in response to contemporary challenges, the federal governance structure in India requires fine-tuning. A directional shift is required from a cooperative model to a collaborative model of federal governance in view of various endogenous and exogenous imperatives of change, such as rising assertiveness of civil society; rising "self awareness" of regional and local political elites; globalization, privatization, and retreat of the central state; and increasing reliance of the national government on intergovernmental coordination mechanisms rather than centralized/hierarchical mechanisms for policy making and implementation. Thus, I reflect on the possibility of supplementing the federal practice in India (known for being "federal in form and unitary in spirit") with collaborative institutions and deliberative processes to achieve policy coordination. Institutional reforms are required to generate the right incentives for welfare enhancing, multi-stakeholder engagement and thereby improve the quality of democracy. Three suggestions offered are: (1) expansion of the existing structural and functional horizons of the Inter-State Council (ISC) to engage, inter alia, non-state actors, enabling it to function as a quasi judicial "collaborative council"; (2) offer constitutional status to the newly formed "collaborative community of national and international experts, practitioners, and partners" named NITI Aayog because only a "constitutional mechanism" can prevent the process/institution(s) of multi stakeholder engagement from being marred by ad-hocism and (3) transfer the financial allocation function of the erstwhile Planning Commission to a permanent Finance Commission because a collaborative federal architecture can develop only in the context of a balanced, transparent, and distortion free system of intergovernmental fiscal relations.

How do we know whether a country suffers from vertical fiscal imbalance (VFI)? What should be done about it? Academic appreciation of these issues in general, and the nature of political behaviour in particular, both have major implications for the way federations are fiscally structured. While the latter clearly is a problem of political negotiations, our focus is on the former, that is, conceptual clarity, which precedes meaningful negotiations. Thus, the paper aims to clarify the multiple usages of the symbolically loaded terms VFI and VFG (vertical fiscal gap) by critically engaging the fundamental assumptions and premises underlying these ostensibly similar notions. It proposes an alternative conceptual framework and introduces the concepts of vertical fiscal asymmetry (VFA) and vertical fiscal difference (VFD) that have the potential to better structure public debate on issues of vertical fiscal relations and stimulate a sensible appreciation of the problem and possible remedies. Adapted from the source document.

How do we know whether a country suffers from vertical fiscal imbalance (VFI)? What should be done about it? Academic appreciation of these issues in general, and the nature of political behaviour in particular, both have major implications for the way federations are fiscally structured. While the latter clearly is a problem of political negotiations, our focus is on the former, that is, conceptual clarity, which precedes meaningful negotiations. Thus, the paper aims to clarify the multiple usages of the symbolically loaded terms VFI and VFG (vertical fiscal gap) by critically engaging the fundamental assumptions and premises underlying these ostensibly similar notions. It proposes an alternative conceptual framework and introduces the concepts of vertical fiscal asymmetry (VFA) and vertical fiscal difference (VFD) that have the potential to better structure public debate on issues of vertical fiscal relations and stimulate a sensible appreciation of the problem and possible remedies.