Indian Westerlies

Moratorium on Cross Border E-Transmissions If one imports a book into India, one will pay applicable customs duty (currently 10% basic customs duty, and all applicable cess/welfare charges). However, if one downloads the same book over Amazon Kindle, one gets it duty free. Kindle books are almost always cheaper than their paper counterparts and the zero import duty is one of the factors keeping it that way, other factors being savings on printing/paper, transportation etc. This is an example of how the moratorium on international cross border taxation on Electronic Transmissions (ET), adopted by WTO in 1998  affect the prices.  Share of Digitalised Products in Global Imports - as represented in UNCTAD study Also, there is the question of direct taxation, in terms of corporate taxes or taxes on profits from the earnings made in India for companies who are highly digitalised in terms of delivery/users/markets (Amazon cloud services, Facebook, Google), and where it is n

Government has tweaked the existing scheme of manufacturing under bond at bonded warehouses (Section 58 to 65 of Customs Act) and has come up with a 'Bonded Manufacturing Scheme' which might revolutionise the way manufacturing units are organised among domestic tariff areas, Free Trade and Warehousing Zones, Export oriented units (EOUs) and Special Economic Zones (SEZs). The relevant customs notification (69/2019) on Manufacture and other operations at Warehouse Regulations 2019 is at this link . Invest India (an arm of government that encourages investments in India through realtime assistance to entities to set up business) maintains a dedicated website for information dissemination on this topic at this link  and the FAQs are hosted  here . Relevant Customs Circular (34/2019) that outlines the regulatory procedural details is at this link . Bonded manufacturing scheme overview - [from Invest India's Bonded manufacturing website] The salient part of this scheme