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Tax Reform in South Asia: Yesterday and Today

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

John Toye
John Toye
Affiliation:
University of Sussex
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Extract

The subject of this paper is the fate of progressive taxation in South Asia. This is a subject about which Kingsley Martin himself would have had mixed feelings. On the one hand, he strongly advocated a redistributive fiscal strategy. On the other hand, he was never at all comfortable examining the kind of economic analysis with which it is usually justified. Somewhat unfairly, he distrusted all orthodox economists on moral grounds (Martin, 1966: 34). Moreover, his prolonged encounter with the unorthodox economics of Maynard Keynes was equally unsatisfactory as an educational experience. Lord Boothby summed up Martin's efforts to learn the technicalities of economics from Keynes as follows: ‘Kingsley simply never understood economics and yet he was always trying to understand. “Explain it to me, then” he would say, but his attention soon wandered’ (Rolph, 1973: 195).

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 23 , Issue 4 , October 1989 , pp. 797 - 813
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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