Some Asides

…so, vibecoding is essentially rebranded hackathons, with a group size of one? Collaborate with machines instead of humans?

Incoming news about the upcoming census in India, made me brush off some old unpublished/presented-at-random-conferences work. While I need to clean up the old analyses a bit, the main point that, if I recall correctly, was emerging in those analyses was that in a country like India, the “governance” dividend to urbanisation was grossly skewed in favour of a type of settlement in the proximity of existing large settlements. In layman terms, what this hinted at was that towns that emerged organically out in the sticks were less likely to reap the benefits attributable to urbanisation. To reap those benefits it was better to “become” urban in the proximity to existing urban settlements. Sort of a “urban sorting”—-suggesting that out in the sticks, it didn’t matter if you were rural or urban.

Need to set this up for upcoming Indian census, as well as the African story. For all the hullabaloo surrounding the “uniqueness” of emergent urbanisation on the continent, are scaling/agglomeration effects actually being realised in the small and medium towns?

While I honestly have never been very interested in public finance, I have been sucked into the world of fiscal policies and trying to understand what constitutes fair/just taxation courtesy an ongoing project.

This leads to the other India connection: a deeper1 reading of the recently tabled annual budget, led me down a rabbit-hole of some intriguing indicators. While the standard indicators related to fiscal discipline themselves tell an interesting story of how constrained the government’s purses are (which then leads to a reading of what constitutes priorities), what caught my eye was the share of different direct taxes (personal income tax (PIT), consumption taxes (CT), and corporate income tax (CIT)) on total tax revenue. Share of CIT has been reducing over time, whereas the share of both PIT and CT have been increasing.

Wearing my tax justice glasses, this immediately set off some triggers. So individuals are now bearing a greater tax burden than corporates? How is that fair?

Quick review of the four countries in one of the project I’m working on told a similar story.

In South Africa, too, share of PIT has been increasing steadily and CIT is dropping. Share of CT has stayed roughly constant though.

In Germany, PIT share going up, CIT share dropping marginally, CT share also dropping. In UK, both PIT and CIT shares increasing, CT share almost steady. In Brazil, both PIT and CIT shares going up slowly, and CT share is dropping slightly. (…But in Brazil, CT constitutes ~4X PIT and ~3x CIT!!)

What does this tell about progressiveness of the tax system as a whole? Yes, I am aware that taxing corporates too much is a no-no (who will create jobs otherwise, blah blah blah). But do declining shares make sense? And increasing share of taxes collected from individuals?

Deeper, as in more than the customary skim through to identify whether anything affects me directly. ↩︎