Moving to Goods and Services Tax in India: Impact on India’s Growth and International Trade

The differential multiple tax regime across sectors of production leads to distortions in allocation of resources thus introducing inefficiencies in the sectors of domestic production. With regard to Indias exports, this leads to lack of international competitiveness of the sectors which would have been relatively efficient under distortion-free indirect tax regime. Further, there is lack of full offsets of taxes loaded on to the fob export prices. Efficient allocation of productive resources and providing full tax offsets is expected to result in gains for GDP, returns to the factors of production and exports of the economy. Implementation of a comprehensive goods and services tax (GST) is expected, ceteris paribus, to provide gains in Indias GDP somewhere within a range of 0.9 to 1.7 per cent. It is expected that the real returns to the factors of production would go up. Our results show gains in returns to land ranging between 0.42 and 0.82 per cent. Wage rate gains vary between 0.68 and 1.33 per cent. Returns to capital would gain somewhere between 0.37 and 0.74 per cent. In sum, implementation of a comprehensive GST in India is expected to lead to efficient allocation of factors of production thus leading to gains in GDP and exports. This would translate into enhanced economic welfare and higher returns to the factors of production, viz. land, labour and capital.