Economic Survey: Some facts about the courtesy GST

1) Many taxpayers, especially small enterprises which deal with large enterprises, have voluntarily chosen to be a part of the GST regime in order to avail input credits.

2) The GST regime has not affected the tax collections of most states as the distribution of the GST base among states is very closely linked to the size of the state economies.

3) Performance of individual states on the international exports front is strongly correlated to the standard of living in the states.

4) When compared to similar economies, large Indian exporters corner a smaller share of total exports.

5) Internal trade within India contributes 60% to the overall economic growth. This is higher than last year’s Survey estimates of inter-state trade of goods at between 30-50% of GDP.

6) The size of India’s formal sector, non-farm payroll is substantially greater than currently believed.

7) Similarly, the size of the formal sector (defined here as being either in the social security or GST net) is 13 percent of total firms in the private non-agriculture sector but 93 percent of their total turnover.

GST data reveals 50% increase in number of Indirect Taxpayers

A preliminary analysis of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) data reveals that there has been a 50 per cent increase in the number of indirect taxpayers, according to the Economic Survey 2017-18 presented on Monday in the Parliament by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley.

Jaitley informed the House that as on December 2017, there were 9.8 million unique GST registrants, slightly more than the total Indirect Tax registrants, under the old system (where many taxpayers were registered under several taxes).

Therefore, adjusting the base for double and triple counting, the GST has increased the number of unique indirect taxpayers by more than 50 per cent –a substantial 3.4 million.

The profile of new filers is interesting of their total turnover, business-to-consumer (B2C) transactions account for only 17 per cent of the total.

It also underlines that the distribution of the GST base among the States is closely linked to the size of their economies, allaying fears of major producing States that the shift to the new system would undermine their tax collections.