Passing the tax smell test | The Indian Express

Passing the tax smell test | The Indian Express

Written by Harsh Gupta |Updated: June 13, 2019 5:10:22 am

The writer is a public markets investor.

Passing the tax smell test

Subramanian’s growth claims would imply a strange boost in tax to GDP ratio.

Arvind Subramanian concluded that the country’s growth has been overestimated by around 2.5 percentage points. (File)

Former Chief Economic Advisor Arvind Subramanian has released a working paper wherein he claims that the actual growth rate of the Indian economy has been overestimated by around 2.5 percentage points from 2011-12 to 2016-17: He has summarised his argument in these pages (‘India’s GDP growth: New evidence for fresh beginnings’, IE, June 11). Instead of the official growth rate of around 7 per cent, actual growth was between 3.5 per cent and 5.5 per cent with a high statistical “confidence interval”.