Hou publishes book on property tax in local economies
Yilin Hou, professor of public administration and international
affairs in the Maxwell School, has published a new book, Local Property Tax In China:
History, Pilots and Prospects, that explores whether it is feasible
to adopt the local property tax in transitional economies like China. The
book has been published simultaneously in English by Springer (New York) and in
Chinese by Science Press (Beijing).
Hou's pursuit of this topic began with an interest in carefully
examining several issues that remain unsettled in the theory and empirics about
property taxation. He was able to take advantage of the "natural
experiment" of China's financial reforms, via the perspective of institutional
economics and political economy, to draw generic lessons that can serve as
contributions to the theories of taxation, public finance, and governance.
This project started in 2011, financed by the Lincoln Institute
of Land Policy (Cambridge, Massachusetts), the Stanley W. Shelton
Professor Fund at the University of Georgia, and the Graduate
School of the University of Georgia. The research was conducted with assistance from Dr. Qiang Ren,
associate professor at the Central University of Finance and Economics
(Beijing, China), then a visiting scholar under Hou's direction at the
University of Georgia, and Dr. Ping Zhang, assistant professor at Fudan
University (Shanghai, China), then a doctoral student under Hou's direction. The book was finished in
2013 with financial support from the China Fiscal Development Center, Beijing,
with Ren and Zhang as co-authors.
Professor Hou has recently been granted funding, renewable for
three years, from the China Fiscal Development Center to pursue the
second stage of this project – to design a theoretically sound,
administratively operable, and politically practical property tax system for
local governments in China. A research team has been set up at the Central University of
Finance and Economics, China, to assist him. The underlying goal of this second stage in
terms of basic research is to thoroughly explore the mechanisms of tax
incidence, land and structure taxation, progressivity, as well as local
development and governance. 10/06/14