TY  - JOUR
A1  - Kalkuhl, Matthias
A1  - Fernandez Milan, Blanca
A1  - Schwerhoff, Gregor
A1  - Jakob, Michael
A1  - Hahnen, Maren
A1  - Creutzig, Felix
T1  - Can land taxes foster sustainable development?
BT  - An assessment of fiscal, distributional and implementation issues
JF  - Land use policy : the international journal covering all aspects of land use
N2  - Economists argue that land rent taxation is an ideal form of taxation as it causes no deadweight losses. Nevertheless, pure land rent taxation is rarely applied. This paper revisits the case of land taxation for developing countries. We first provide an up-to-date review on land taxation in development countries, including feasibility and implementation challenges. We then simulate land tax reforms for Rwanda, Peru, Nicaragua and Indonesia, based on household surveys. We find that (i) land taxes provide a substantial untapped potential for tax revenues at minimal deadweight losses; that (ii) linear land value taxes tend to put a high relative burden on poor households as land ownership is pervasive; (iii) non-linear tax schemes could avoid adverse effects on the poor; and that (iv) with technological advances, administrative costs of land taxes have reduced substantially and are outweighed by tax revenues and co-benefits of formalized land tenure. Enforcement and compliance remain, however, a key challenge.
KW  - Fiscal policy
KW  - Public economics
KW  - Optimal taxes
KW  - Tax incidence
KW  - Land use
Y1  - 2018
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2018.07.008
SN  - 0264-8377
SN  - 1873-5754
VL  - 78
SP  - 338
EP  - 352
PB  - Elsevier Science Publishers Ltd.
CY  - Oxford
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Kalkuhl, Matthias
A1  - Schwerhoff, Gregor
A1  - Waha, Katharina
T1  - Land tenure, climate and risk management
JF  - Ecological economics
N2  - We analyze to what extent climate conditions affect the prevalence of sharecropping as a form of traditional land tenure. We investigate how sharecropping tenure is related to climate risk and how it interacts with fertilizer use and livestock ownership that both influence production risk. We first develop a stylized theoretical model to illustrate the role of climate for land tenure and production. Our empirical analysis is based on more than 9000 households with considerable heterogeneity in climate conditions across several African countries. We find that farmers in areas with low precipitation are more likely to be sharecroppers. We further find evidence for risk management interaction effects as sharecropping farmers are less likely to own livestock and more likely to use fertilizer. In economies where formal kinds of insurance are unavailable, sharecropping thus functions as a form of insurance and reduces the need for potentially costly risk management strategies.
KW  - traditional land tenure
KW  - climate
KW  - risk management
KW  - agriculture
KW  - Africa
KW  - sharecropping
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.106573
SN  - 0921-8009
SN  - 1873-6106
VL  - 171
PB  - Elsevier Science
CY  - Amsterdam [u.a.]
ER  -