EVALUATING VALUE CAPTURE INSTRUMENTS
RICHARD GROVER
Since Henry George’s Poverty and Progress governments have developed a series of value capture instruments to extract increases in land values. These can be seen as alternatives to taxes. Whereas the taxes explicitly extract value from the owner or developer many of the other instruments can be argued to do this by stealth. This stands in the way of evaluating the effectiveness of such instruments and whether their use is the most effective way of achieving the desired objective or whether explicit taxation might be more effective. The paper applies some standard measures of the efficiency of taxes to evaluate the value capture instruments, including equity, certainty of liability, administrative efficiency, transparency, convenience, neutrality, and fairness. It compares their performance against these to those property taxes that can be used as means of value capture.
Event: Land Governance in an Interconnected World_Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty_2018
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