India’s big leap forward

India has passed reforms paving the way for a single national rate of valued-added tax, which should give the economy a significant boost.

India's parliament has just passed "the most significant tax reform since independence", says Una Galani on BreakingViews.com. The bill paving the way for a single, national rate of GST (the equivalent of VAT) on goods and services to replace a bewildering patchwork of different levies in the country's 29 states had been stuck in the legislature for years. The news shows that Prime Minister Narendra Modi can "compromise to get things done".

India is less of a single market than the EU, as Mihir Sharma points out on BloombergView.com. The states' tax systems aren't interconnected, while licensing scheme and regulations also vary. This incoherence is a key reason why India's companies tend to be smaller than their global rivals. "The moment you grow out of your home state, even if just to open a warehouse elsewhere, your paperwork increases exponentially."

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Andrew Van Sickle
Editor, MoneyWeek

Andrew is the editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He grew up in Vienna and studied at the University of St Andrews, where he gained a first-class MA in geography & international relations.

After graduating he began to contribute to the foreign page of The Week and soon afterwards joined MoneyWeek at its inception in October 2000. He helped Merryn Somerset Webb establish it as Britain’s best-selling financial magazine, contributing to every section of the publication and specialising in macroeconomics and stockmarkets, before going part-time.

His freelance projects have included a 2009 relaunch of The Pharma Letter, where he covered corporate news and political developments in the German pharmaceuticals market for two years, and a multiyear stint as deputy editor of the Barclays account at Redwood, a marketing agency.

Andrew has been editing MoneyWeek since 2018, and continues to specialise in investment and news in German-speaking countries owing to his fluent command of the language.