Economic Survey primer: Here are short notes on key economic policy issues

The Survey had a series of short notes on economic policy issues. A few of them are excerpted below:

On GST

• The goods and services tax (GST) GST Council offers a model “technology” of cooperative federalism to apply to many other policy reforms.
• There has been a 50 per cent increase in the number of indirect taxpayers; and a large increase in voluntary registrations, especially by small enterprises that buy from large enterprises and want to avail themselves of input tax credits.
• 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.

Fiscal federalism

• Long-run