Search results

Within the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe, radical and far‐reaching programmes of reform are taking place. Central to these are the processes of privatisation and decentralisation which require the newly‐created tiers of local government to develop their own sources of locally‐based revenue. The property tax represents what is, from an international perspective, the most important, stable source of revenue for local government. The majority of the new emerging democracies have introduced or are in the process of introducing ad valorem‐based property taxes. This paper begins by focusing on those key elements which are central to the successful implementation of such systems and then gives a brief summary of developments in two transitional countries, namely, Armenia and the Czech Republic.

This paper presents estimates of total personal income for every U.S state in 1880, 1890, 1900, and 1910. The series includes new figures for 1890 and 1910, and revisions of Richard Easterlin's (1960) figures for 1880 and 1900 based on recent economic history research. The new estimates allow better examination of U.S. interregional income differences and cyclical behavior of U.S. states’ total personal income.

Because Malaysia decided to liberalize its property sector, investors have shown a considerable interest in the country’s property investment. Divided into five sub-sectors, Malaysia’s real estate is sought actively by foreign investors. However, to date, the sub-sectors performance analysis has never been researched for the purpose of investment diversification within the property sector. This paper aims to examine the performance of sub-sectors in the property market, namely, residential, commercial, industrial, agricultural and development land. This paper also assesses the portfolio diversification benefits within the sectors.

Quarterly data from 2002 or 2014 are used to analyze the performance of the Malaysia property market. The analysis is conducted in three phases, pre-liberalization, post-liberalization and overall period, because it considers the liberalization policy introduced in 2009. Statistically, the risk-adjusted return featuring Sharpe’s index is used to observe how these sub-sectors perform relative to each other. Correlation analysis is used to observe the existence of diversification benefits in terms of a Malaysia property context.

It is found that Malaysia’s real estate sub-sectors have different rankings during the pre- and post-liberalization periods. The difference is due to changes in their average return and the risk. During the post-liberalization period, risk for all sub-sectors has increased but has been well compensated by the return. The residential property sector maintains its ranking position as the best sub-sector for every risk investor’s encounter.

Due to wide range of differences and non-uniformity of costs associated with housings, for example tax rates, rental stream, LTV and others, this research focuses on values and data supplied by NAPIC only.

Although performance and portfolio diversification benefits have been tested in many Asian countries, none has tried to assess the Malaysia property. This research enables the policy maker to be informed on whether the sub-sectors are performing in accordance to country’s requirement and which sub-sectors need to be improved further.

This study uses county-level property tax data to assess alternative theories for government interaction in setting tax rates. Tests of the two theories, tax competition and yardstick competition, incorporate data for both mobile and immobile property. Using spatial econometrics, results show a statistically significant, positive effect of neighbor rates on local rates for mobile property, consistent with both forms of competition. However, similar statistically significant positive effects for immobile property are consistent only with yardstick competition. The results have implications for decision making in the competitive environment government authorities face.

A long‐standing argument for historic preservation of houses has been the positive externalities that it produces. The purpose of this paper is to quantify the externality associated with the designation of historical houses in San Diego, California under the Mills Act.

The Mills Act allows for individual houses to be designated as historically significant. This results in neighborhoods where historically designated houses are side‐by‐side with houses with no particular historic significance. The positive externality hypothesis predicts that the value of a house should be a function of the number of historically designated houses within the neighborhood. The proximity of historically designated houses on the sales price of other non‐historic houses is valued using hedonic regression analysis.

The results suggest that a house's value is increased by 3.8 per cent by having a historical house within 250 ft, and by 1.6 per cent by having a historical home located between 250 and 500 ft away. Under the Mills Act, property taxes are lowered on the historically designated properties, costing local governments tax revenues. Based on the results presented in this paper, the overall taxable basis for the neighborhood increases by $1.8 million for each historical home. Estimates are provided that show that local governments might expect a net tax revenue gain of US$14,000 per house per year.

The Mills Act is a market‐based approach to historic preservation. Homeowners are encouraged to pursue designation of their property for property tax reductions. This paper demonstrates that local governments also gain through this program through higher property tax revenues.

Local governments in the U.S. rely less on the property tax than they have historically. This long-term trend has been accompanied by important shifts in the composition of local revenues. While the property tax still serves as one primary source of local government revenue, increasingly other sources are used to pay for local government. This paper first examines that trend, the forces behind it, and its regional impact. We then explore trends in three central states - - Iowa, Nebraska, and Arkansas -- that have experienced substantial revenue shifts in recent years. A concluding section discusses the options for the future.

There is a danger that any significant changes in the rating system will involve only dwellings and that non‐domestic rating will continue as before. There are, however, strong arguments for either the reform, or abolition of, rates on business premises. They are not related to ability to pay or the cost of services used; the payers are not local voters and infrequent revaluations alter unfairly the relative burdens of different businesses. Non‐domestic rates provided an estimated 24 per cent of local government rate fund revenue in Great Britain in 1981/82 compared with 19 per cent contributed by domestic rate payers and 57 per cent from Exchequer grants.

This chapter brings the recent sociology of entrepreneurship, sociologies and geographies of responsibility, and critical reflections on place and space together to ask why entrepreneurs show leadership in a place, and where they might want to lead it. Drawing on a set of qualitative interviews conducted from 2018 to 2020 with small business operators in rural Nova Scotia, Canada, the chapter explores how interviewees frame their business ideas, decisions, practices and aspirations not (just) in terms of conventional business objectives like profit or market share, but in terms of something I term responsibility to place. Responsibility to place emerges through the interviews as a feeling that one’s business should make a positive impact on place – inclusive of its people, environment, culture, history, and future. This feeling exists in tension with the objectives of Nova Scotia’s entrepreneurial ecosystem managers, as is seen in the discrepancies between interviewees’ narratives and the discourses propagated by the province’s economic development agencies, focused as they are on export-led growth. The findings from this sample indicate that understanding the “geographies of responsibility” (Massey, 2004) in entrepreneurs’ narratives is critical to a fuller appreciation of entrepreneurial Place leadership.

The growing displacement of theory and other forms of wide-ranging knowledge of social phenomena by empirical research methods in economics is widely noted by economists and historians of economic knowledge. Less attention has been devoted, however, to understand the materialization of such changes in the scientific practices. This article studies the recent transformations in the epistemological practices at CEDE, a research center in Colombia. I use a machine learning technique called Topic Modeling, interviews to CEDE researchers, and exegesis of papers to characterize a shift in the production of knowledge in microeconometrics at CEDE during the years 2000 and 2018. I explain this shift by characterizing two sets of epistemological practices that implies a recent tendency to disdain research that cannot make a “strong” causal inference.

Based on the brief historical review, the purpose of this paper is to expound the target and bottom line for the farmland institutional reform of in China, analyze the “Chinese scenes” and historical heritage of farmland institutional arrangement, evaluate the policies and their effects over the last four decades and outline the keynotes and possible direction of the future reform.

The paper builds the analytical clue of “institutional target – institutional heritage – policy effort – realistic dilemma – future direction” and review and forecast the Chinese farmland institutional reform.

The farmland institution is an important issue with Chinese characteristics. Over the last four decades, the farmland institutional reform in China has focused on “stabilizing the land property rights” and “promote the farmland transfer.” As the study indicates, the promotion of farmland transfer has not effectively improved the scale economy of agriculture and stabilizing land property rights by titling may restrain the development of farmland transfer market because farmland transfer is of special market logic.

It depends on the revitalization of farmland management rights to resolve the transaction constraint of personal property and its endowment effect in farmland transfer. And, classifying the land management property to involve farmers into the economy of division can be reference for the reform of traditional agriculture worldwide.