Category: Current Affairs

From the excellent Timothy Taylor:

Back in 1990, 12 high-income countries had wealth taxes. By 2017, that had dropped to four: France, Norway, Spain, and Switzerland (In 2018, France changed its wealth tax so that it applied only to real estate, not to financial assets.)  The OECD describes the reasons why other countries have been dropping wealth taxes, along with providing a balanced pro-and-con of the arguments over wealth taxes, in its report The Role and Design of Net Wealth Taxes in the OECD (April 2018).

For the OECD, the bottom line is that it is reasonable for policy-makers to be concerned about the rising inequality of wealth and large concentrations of wealth But it also points out that if a country has reasonable methods of taxing capital gains, inheritances, intergenerational gifts, and property, a combination of these approaches are typically preferable to a wealth tax.  The report notes: “Overall … from both an efficiency and an equity perspective, there are limited arguments for having a net wealth tax on top of well-designed capital income taxes –including taxes on capital gains – and inheritance taxes, but that there are arguments for having a net wealth tax as an (imperfect) substitute for these taxes.”

Here, I want to use the OECD report to dig a little deeper into what wealth taxes mean, and some of the practical problems they present.

The most prominent proposals for a US wealth tax would apply only to those with extreme wealth, like those with more than $50 million in wealth.  However, European countries typically imposed wealth taxes at much lower levels of wealth…

It’s interesting, then, that in these European countries the wealth tax generally accounted for only a small amount of government revenue. The OECD writes: “In 2016, tax revenues from individual net wealth taxes ranged from 0.2% of GDP in Spain to 1.0% of GDP in Switzerland. As a share of total tax revenues, they ranged from 0.5% in France to 3.7% in Switzerland … Switzerland has always stood out as an exception, with tax revenues from individual net wealth taxes which have been consistently higher than in other countries …” However, Switzerland apparently has no property tax, and instead uses the wealth tax as a substitute.

The fact that wealth taxes collect relative little is part of the reason that a number of countries decided that they weren’t worth the bother. In addition, it suggests that a US wealth tax which doesn’t kick in until $50 million in wealth or more will not raise meaningfully large amounts of revenue.

There are many more excellent points at the link.  Here is another:

A wealth tax will tend to encourage borrowing. Total wealth is equal to the value of assets minus the value of debts. Thus, one way to avoid a wealth tax is to borrow a lot of money, in ways that may or may not be socially beneficial.

Tim concludes:

To me, many of the endorsements of a wealth tax feels more like expressions of righteous exasperation than like serious and considered policy proposals.

Recommended.  If you would like another point of view, Saez and Zucman respond to some criticisms here.

From my email, from Ryan Reynolds:

I’ve worked in Palmerston North, as well as Tauranga and Auckland (all briefly). I’m Australian too, so my perspective may be shaded vs what a Kiwi or someone from further afield might say.

The major issue is just supply of new dwellings and the permitting and development process. All the rest of the factors noted point to increases in demand (immigration, natural population growth, easy credit, real income growth, tax structures, chinese buyers) – but without a limit on supply you would have expected those factors to result in a building boom not a rapid price appreciation. That’s obviously not the way reality has played out.

From a permitting side, the Resource Management Act heavily constrains lots of building decisions and imposes a lot of bureaucracy (and time delays and uncertainty). Less specifically, Kiwi’s appear to have strong preferences for careful building and urban sprawl in lots of dimensions. That includes specific issues like building heights, overshadowing, retaining views of specific hills or valleys (including Maori heritage sites) and retaining its environmental and cultural heritage (however brief it may seem to outsiders). These preferences are captured in major urban plans which set out acceptable terms for developments, but often even urban plans won’t contain enough zoned land to meet demand (see the bun fight over the Auckland Unitary Plan from 2016), and even then those plans took years to put together. This plays out in a strong community undercurrent and politicians of both stripes use scare campaigns about the horrors of inappropriate development. Anything two stories or over can count as ‘inappropriate’.

From a policy perspective there seems to be no understanding of the practical trade off between housing demand and conservation, except from economists outside the planning departments (see NZ Initative or Michael Reddell, ex RBNZ) or from the central government threatening to unwind urban plans.

The second issue is that NZ also has a lot of partly and wholly government owned and operated utilities (water supply, networks and wastewater; electricity and gas networks; electricity generation) and services provided under government monopolies required for new developments (roads, education, healthcare, and other social services). In many cases the entities charged with providing these services are capital and/or budget constrained and they don’t have the funds to provide major new capex works in the short to medium term. Furthermore, the revenues earned from providing these services are often inadequate to cover economic costs. For instance, water supply and wastewater is provided at below cost price in many cases in NZ, and in large parts of the country water supply is un-metered. And there is serious community opposition to either privatization or changes in tariffs. As a consequence though, capex projects in the water sector are effectively large donations of capital for no return for the water corporation. As is the case for virtually all roads, schools, or hospital projects, any of which could prevent or stall major new urban developments. So even if new land was zoned as ‘fit for development’ (which it won’t be), the entities required to facilitate that development don’t have the funds to do so and nobody else is allowed to fill that gap.

And yes, Palmerston North is still dull. But then people say that Switzerland is dull too. I’ve seen much worse.