Impact of GST Implementation and Covid-19 on Tax Revenue of States in India.

Goods and Services Tax (GST) completed its four years in July 2021. It was expected that by implementing GST in the country, the governments (Central and States) would be able to solve many tax-related problems such as tax evasion, cascading effect, increasing competition among states for inviting investment, and most importantly increasing states' tax revenue, more autonomy and expenditure. Has the imposition of GST in India impacted the tax revenue of states? Has the outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic impacted the GST of all the states and union territories? The paper deals with these specific questions constituting a sample of all states and some union territories for the period 2015 to 2021 categorized into pre-GST (2015-2017) and post-GST (2017-2021) period. The secondary data comprises average proportion of own tax revenue of states in their total revenue, and the data has been analyzed to find out whether imposition of GST has impacted the collection of own tax revenue of states, and whether the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted the collection of SGST and UTGST of states and union territories. The tools and techniques applied for testing the hypothesis are Wilcoxon Sign Rank Test, paired t-test and Kruskal-Wallis H-test. The findings reveal that imposition of GST has no significant impact on own tax revenue of states, but Covid-19 significantly impacted SGST and UTGST. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]