Social Structure, Tax Culture and the State: Tamil Nadu, India

Professor Barbara Harris-White presents a paper written with Amrita Jairaj. Professor Harris-White, ratifies ‘Tax’ as the compulsory collection of money (and occasionally goods or services) - is a prime source of revenue for the state, and a prime mover of public expenditure. In India, net revenue is 6% of GDP. The political process of taxation is thought to be a fine summary indicator of state legitimacy and governance capacity. However, while in OECD countries this notion is an open social fact and tax is a prominent aspect of electoral politics, elsewhere it disappears - along with scholarship on the subject. Harris-White seeks to go a small way to remedy this neglect. It also contributes to a small school of work in Oxford which is challenging the routine tendency to analyse the state without reference to society, and seeks to explore through field research the ways in which the organisation and practices of the state, the market and institutions of civil society are embedded in social structures of accumulation in which social identity can and usually does play important roles. Professor Barbara Harriss-White is the Director, Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford University's Department of International Development, Professor of Development Studies and Fellow of Wolfson College. Her disciplinary background is in Agricultural Science, Agricultural Economics, Development Economics, Economic Anthropology and Development Studies. She has examined structures and relations of identity as regulators of accumulation and class formation in India's non-state-regulated economy. This video was recorded in the Cairnes Graduate School of Business and Public Policy at the National University of Ireland, Galway during the "Growth and Crisis: Social Structure of Accumulation Theory and Analysis" held in Galway (Ireland) between the 2nd and 4th of November 2006. The academic committee of this conference was composed of Terrence McDonough at NUIG, Michael Reich at the University of California, Berkeley, and David Kotz at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst . Further details are available online on our official blog at http://ssagalway.blogspot.com/

Google Video | November 15, 2006

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