Taxes in Cities

Details

Serval ID
serval:BIB_E0E96E69AC2F
Type
A part of a book
Publication sub-type
Chapter: chapter ou part
Collection
Publications
Institution
Title
Taxes in Cities
Title of the book
Handbook of regional and urban economics
Author(s)
Brülhart  M., Bucovetsky  S., Schmidheiny  K.
Publisher
Amsterdam, NL: North-Holland Elsevier
ISBN
978-0-444-59517-7
Publication state
Published
Issued date
2015
Editor
Duranton G., Henderson J. V., Strange W.
Volume
5B
Chapter
17
Pages
1123-1196
Language
english
Abstract
Most cities enjoy some autonomy over how they tax their residents, and that autonomy is typically exercised by multiple municipal governments within a given city. In this chapter, we document patterns of city-level taxation across countries, and we review the literature on a number of salient features affecting local tax setting in an urban context. In OECD countries, urban local governments on average raise some 10% of total tax revenue, and in non-OECD countries, they raise around half that share. We show that most cities are highly fragmented: urban areas with more than 500,000 inhabitants are divided into 74 local jurisdictions on average. The vast majority of these cities are characterized by a central municipality that strongly dominates the remaining jurisdictions in terms of population. These empirical regularities imply that analyses of urban taxation need to take account of three particular features: interdependence among tax-setting authorities (horizontally and vertically), jurisdictional size asymmetries, and the potential for agglomeration economies. We survey the relevant theoretical and empirical literatures, focusing in particular on models of asymmetric tax competition, of taxation and income sorting, and of taxation in the presence of agglomeration rents.
Keywords
Cities, Taxes, Tax competition, Fiscal federalism, Agglomeration, Sorting
Create date
22/01/2016 14:58
Last modification date
20/08/2019 17:05
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