Some numbers scare you. Some numbers look so unreasonably large that it seems daunting to you, infeasible even. Other numbers, when wrapped in the right kind of narrative, seem so unreasonably small that they sway you (the Rs. 32 per person per day poverty line comes to mind). Thus, when you are dealing with numbers that intuitively look very large or very small, it is important that you build the right narrative around them. Wrap them well so that it doesn’t scare or haunt people. As the old Mirinda Lime ad used to say, “zor ka jhatka.. dheere se lage..”.
So the number in the headline of this blog post is the proposed rate of the Goods and Service Tax. While it is the revenue-neutral amount that needs to be charge should excise and sales and other taxes go, the number looks stupendously large. The way this number was reported on the front pages of business newspapers this morning, it looks so large and out of whack that people might decide that it is better to not have a GST at all.
I’m not blaming the papers for this – they have reported what they’ve been told. It is a question of building narratives by the government. The government, and the GST sub-panel, has done a lousy job of communicating this number, and guiding how it needs to be reported in the media. It is almost as if the way the number was reported is an attempt to further delay the implementation of the GST.
The GST is too important a piece of legislation to be derailed by bad narratives. The government must make every attempt to build a narrative that shows the GST as being conducive to people and to businesses, to show how the transaction costs it reduces will result in better prices for both consumers and businesses, and why it makes lives better. Reporting numbers that look really large doesn’t help matters.
Also, the quant in me is disappointed to see one precise number being put out as the “revenue neutral rate”. Since different goods and services which are now being taxed at differential rates are going to be brought into this one umbrella rate, the real revenue neutral rate is actually a function of the mix of the contribution of each of these goods and services to the GDP. Given that in a dynamic economy these rates are constantly changing, reporting one revenue neutral rate simply doesn’t make sense. A range would be a better way of going about it.
Related to this, given that the revenue neutral rate is a function of mix of goods and services, and this mix will change over time, the assumptions and forecasts that need to be taken into account in the process of fixing the rate are important. The GST panel would do well to take into account the risk of product-and-service mix changing that can make all calculations go awry!
PS: If only they were to hire me as a consultant to this panel 😛