Taxing the Urban Boom: Property Taxation and Land Leasing in Kigali and Addis Ababa

Goodfellow, Tom

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2634036

Cited by 21 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…Because they are easily identified and immovable, they are potentially easily taxed. And in many lowincome countries, urban-centric economic growth and continued urbanisation mean that urban real estate values have grown fast, generating enormous unearned wealth for property owners (Goodfellow 2015). Despite being widely recognised as an economically efficient and progressive revenue source, property taxes are much underused in virtually all low-income countries.…”

Section: Property Taxes 30mentioning

confidence: 99%

How Can Governments of Low-Income Countries Collect More Tax Revenue?

Moore

Prichard

2020

Social Policy in a Development Context

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It is widely believed that the governments of many low-income countries, and especially the relatively poor performers, should be aiming to increase the proportion of GDP they raise in tax revenue. There are risks in emphasising increasing revenue at the expense of other objectives. Governments also need to be concerned with questions of equity, efficiency, trust and reciprocity, among others. However, the question of how governments can further increase revenue is a central part of that broader story. It is a big question. We address it by answering three more precise questions.

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Section: Property Taxes 30mentioning

confidence: 99%

How Can Governments of Low-Income Countries Collect More Tax Revenue?

Moore

Prichard

2020

Social Policy in a Development Context

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“…Further, trends across other Sub-Saharan African countries give reason to expect similar realities elsewhere-as private investment in economic infrastructures like energy, communication technologies, and transportation is growing across the region, all while official development assistance remains rather stagnant, if diversifying in its origins (see figure 4 below). Despite such growth in investments, in African cities from Maputo through to Addis Ababa, Freetown, Harare, Kampala and more, local authorities and tax scholars bemoan the challenges of tapping into this investment boom through modernizing property taxation systems that would strengthen the own-source revenues and, relatedly, the tax bargaining potential for Africa's urban residents (Goodfellow, 2015(Goodfellow, , 2016Jibao and Prichard, 2015;Prichard, 2015;Nengeze, 2018;Bakibinga and Ngabirano, 2019;Grieco et al, 2019). Instead of bolstering the public purse, the clearest manifestation of these latest interests-outside the actual investment projects that partnerships with donors and the private sector bring-is in the residential and commercial space sectors within the city.…”

Section: The Financial Architecture Of Urban Development In Maputomentioning

confidence: 99%

Aid’s urban footprint and its implications for local inequality and governance

Carolini

2020

Environ Plan A

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This paper analyzes how local urban development, and governance therein, are being shaped by the explosion of actors within the donor and investment community in African countries like Mozambique. More specifically, drawing on qualitative fieldwork in Maputo, existing data on aid and private sector flows to Mozambique, and a spatial analysis of new real estate developments between 2009 and 2017, I forward two novel arguments about the negative externcalities fostered by the growing density of the community of international development professionals and their foreign private-sector counterparts in the Mozambican capital of Maputo. First, I show that the increasing density of international actors in the capital city and their living needs, as well as how those needs are treated by the public sector, are deepening a housing, infrastructure, and amenities divide between the rentier and international classes in the city and the majority of low-income residents. Second, I contend that the very readiness of non-tax revenue sources from international agents is enabling a continued reliance on external funding, rather than own-source revenues, for major capital investments. This balance in favor of external financing further diminishes the already weak tax bargaining potential of the local population in making demands for urban development projects that directly serve them. In conclusion, I argue that the international development organizations portending an interest in the enhancement of urban equities and fiscal responsibility across cities like Maputo especially need to rethink their operational presence to better address the perverse externalities of their physical and socio-economic imprints on the urban landscapes in which they operate.

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“…White and Wahba's work provides an important new bridge between the established body of literature on urban finance and the growing demand for research on urban climate finance. Financing low-carbon, climateresilient infrastructure at scale, they argue, depends on a prosaic agenda with a long history behind it: strong fiscal underpinnings with appropriate and reliable fiscal transfers from the national level and sufficient ownsource revenues at the local level (Bird and Smart 2002); higher-quality financial data, budgeting and financial management systems at the local level (Cartwright et al 2018); effective mechanisms to record and track liabilities across levels of governments (Ahmad 2015); and the systematic tackling of other preconditions for private investment, including clear legislation about the conditions for using particular financing instruments (Gorelick 2018), the development of comprehensive, fair land registries and valuation systems (Berrisford et al 2018) and the political appetite to collect taxes in an equitable and effective way (Goodfellow 2015). The climate crisis does not change these fundamentals, but demands renewed attention to municipal finance to enable action.…”

Section: The Papers In This Special Issuementioning

confidence: 99%