In addition to the 50% increase in revenue,

[T]he migration from land and improvements valuations to land only with the rates set by zoning was designed to encourage people to develop land fully or sell it to those who will.

According to the source article, houses in some parts of Harare had already been exempt before the change. Thanks to Gil Herman for the link.

Our local authorities, if they were serious about the need for more revenue without burdening residents, would seek a similar system.

And some Chicagoans might want to try Harare activists’ approach to the privatization of parking and towing.

A quick skim indicates that on the whole it’s pretty good, though it seems to overestimate the difficulty of assessing land value, and repeats the error of some previous studies which conflates owners of land occupied by low income people with the low income people themselves. (More likely, low income people are renters living on land owned by someone else, and when taxes on such land increase the owners can’t pass the cost on to their tenants.)

There is also mention of a study, new to me, that seems to document an anti-sprawl benefit from a land tax. The study unfortunately is secured by ssrn; I shall have to try to find it elsewhere.

This study was requested and funded by the Minnesota legislature.

Hat tip to lvtfan.

We know that the major cause of the business cycle is the capitalization and trading of government-protected privilege.  This privilege can be any kind of income obtained without producing, and may flow from spectrum licenses, drilling rights, patents, copyrights, or a hundred other sources.  But the main one is land ownership, since land is not a product of human labour.

When demand increases for a product or service, production can increase, but that isn’t true of privilege. The only limit on the price of privilege is what the market will bear without breaking.   So can’t we measure that price, use the information to forecast economic meltdowns, and thus become wealthy?

Our massive government statistics operations, which know how much more Asian-American households spend on rice than the rest of us do (4 times as much, as of 2003), and that people spend an average of 2.43 hours each weekday watching television, know just about nothing about the price of land.  Only a few countries maintain any such information (Korea, Japan, Denmark, and Australia come to mind).  Many local authorities compile land assessments, but the relationship to actual market prices is, at best, elastic, and the information is not systematically reported.  So indirect and ephemeral indicators must be relied upon.

Moreover, they land price cycle tends to run about 18 years, and may be disrupted by war (not by much else, it appears). This means that taking advantage of it requires a great deal of patience and, one can only say, a certain amount of faith.  And starting at a young enough age, by the way. Of course the cycle might be entirely abolished, but that would require the elites, and some of the non-elites, to surrender significant privilege.

The book is well-written, well-edited, and well-documented. (A subject index would be nice.) Economist Mason Gaffney’s  review is far more informed than anything I could have produced.  He points out a number of imperfections, but on the whole this is a very useful book for anybody who wants to know why many of us aren’t rich, or who would like to be.

A good balance between failing to adequately describe it and going beyond the readers’ attention span.  British, but comprehensible.

The report also notes that it costs virtually nothing to tax land at a higher rate than improvements.  Examples cited include Harrisburg and Allentown, PA.  Information is from Josh Vincent of the Center for the Study of Economics.

In  Illinois, the Cook County Board could pursue a similar strategy using existing authority to tax land and improvements as two different classes of real estate.  As previously discussed here, the Assessor could take a big step in this direction by just valuing vacant land as prescribed by existing laws and ordinances.