ABSTRACT
One of the central choices that confronts designers of direct taxes is that of the precise combination of equity and administrative ease. Both equity and administrative ease are normally accepted as desirable objectives in the design of taxes. Equity requires a tax sufficiently flexible to adjust the size of the tax payment to the individual taxpayer’s ability to pay. Administrative simplicity, by contrast, requires a tax where the due payment can be quickly and simply calculated, and promptly and conveniently collected. This chapter re-examines the proposal of an Agricultural Holding Tax (AHT) for India in the light of the opposing resolutions of the equity versus ease dilemma. The AHT proposal can be said to be in the broad tradition of Wald’s ‘ideal land tax’, as reformulated in the Indian context by T. M. Joshi and his collaborators.
