An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Deval Desai (Sabbatical Fellow, 2024)
The Anti-fiscal State
State institutions are formed by the tax they raise and the revenue they expend. Literatures on the fiscal state have a sophisticated theoretical vocabulary to tie fiscal processes to state institutional capacity and its political drivers, state-citizen relations (especially through tax bargains and accountability), and state-society relations (especially through state welfare provision).
How should we understand the forms of states that fail to tax and under-expend? Those same literatures would see these as “flawed states”: driven by some combination of low fiscal capacity, deficient institutional structures, and a variety of political strategies, these states deviate from an institutional logic of fiscal efficacy. Here, every non-collection or non-distribution of funds is in fact either a failure to collect and distribute, or a collection and distribution in disguise (e.g. suspending welfare distributions until the run-up to an election).
By contrast, and drawing on examples from India, this talk takes under-collection and under-spending on its own terms, to foreground their legal and institutional arrangements that may constitute a distinctive form of the state. This approach is animated by a well-established theoretical move that insists on analysing the politics and institutions of Global South states on their own terms, rather than as deviations from Global North models. What form and theory of the state, I ask, is embodied in its anti-fiscal practices?
Please join in-person, or click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/81857401179
Passcode: 6aSe7GF7