Head Tax Research Articles

Jewish–Christian Relations in Aleppo as Background for the Jewish Response to the Events of October 1850

On Wednesday evening, 17 October 1850, at the height of ʿId al-adha, the Muslim Feast of Sacrifice, riots broke out in Aleppo in northern Syria, starting with Muslim riots in the Christian quarters of Judayda and Saliba. For two days, Muslim rioters looted homes and churches in these and other Christian quarters in the city, killing and wounding a number of the inhabitants. Only on Friday did the riots cease, but the insurgents then presented a list of demands to the authorities as a pre-condition for the restoration of order to the city. Their principal demands were that the authorities‧ intention to impose military conscription on Muslims be revoked, that the ringing of church bells and the carrying of crosses in public religious processions be banned; and that the owning of Muslim slaves by Christians be prohibited. The Ottoman governor, Mustafa Zarif Pasha, at first consented to the demands of the rioters, and even took certain steps to restore calm to the ruffled atmosphere, such as declaring that the firda head tax, one of the inflammatory factors that had contributed to the riots, would be transformed into a property tax.

Equitable Nonlinear Price Regulation: An Alternative Approach to Serial Cost Sharing

This paper examines the serial cost share rule from a perspective of nonlinear pricing. The expenditure function concept is introduced to facilitate the modelling of a wide variety of pricing mechanisms including those featuring head taxes, block pricing, or volume discounts. Axioms on equitable price regulation are shown to characterize the serial expenditure function, a pricing mechanism which induces the distribution of serial cost shares. Several such characterizations are offered in a variety of technological contexts.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: D63, C71

Bargaining between benevolent jurisdictions or when delegation induces inefficiencies

This paper considers the problem of bargaining between benevolent jurisdictions about local public goods and head taxes. It is shown that delegation to benevolent jurisdictions will, in general, induce distortions away from efficiency, where efficiency means an efficient provision of local public goods and an efficient distribution of consumers. This distortion is caused by (1) the divergence between social and jurisdictional objectives, and (2) the impossibility for jurisdictions to realize side payments without modifying either the provision of local public goods or the distribution of consumers.

The Rural Councillor as Development Agent : An Uneasy Connection ? A Report from Senegal

The rural council in Senegal is commissioned to play an important role in development. The council is the formal authority to decide on land distribution and land disputes. In addition, it is authorized to collect the yearly head tax and market fees and to decide which collective utilities or projects will be financed. In every arrondissement there is a technical team, the staff of the 'Centre d'Expansion Rural’ (CER), which has been created to assist the council in planning and implementatio...

The provision of local public goods and factors in the presence of firm and household mobility

This paper studies the efficiency properties of allocations when firms and households are mobile and when local governments provide local public goods and local public factors. The analysis differentiates between immobile land owners and perfectly mobile workers and concludes that an efficient allocation is obtained if there is no outflow of land rents to absentee owners. If rents flow out, only local public goods are supplied in accordance with the Samuelson Rule. The provision of local public factors is inefficiently low, however, and jurisdictions tax mobile firms and mobile households inefficiently high in order to restrict the outflow of rents. An optimal intervention scheme is derived in this case. We also analyze the distortions that result when the non-availability of local head taxes makes it impossible to internalize crowding costs.

Mobile Labor, Multiple Tax Instruments, and Tax Competition

The tax competition literature shows that local governments keep property tax rates inefficiently low to prevent capital outflows, thereby underproviding local public goods. This paper adds mobile labor and an alternative tax instrument to the model. Jurisdictions have access to a property tax levied on land and capital, plus either a head tax or a labor tax. Scale economies in public good provision create incentives to use the property tax, but these incentives are not accompanied by increased incentives to underprovide public goods. In contrast, underprovision is associated with the use of a distortionary labor tax.

Local income taxation: An externality, Pigouvian solution, and public policies

Traditionally, public finance economists have suggested that the migration incentives created by taxes on income make such taxes inferior to head taxes for local governments. This paper develops this argument in a model in which the choice of tax instrument is endogenously determined by majority rule in each jurisdiction. An asymmetric income distribution and majority rule can lead a local government to choose income taxes over head taxes. Although income is exogenous in the model, taxes on income are Pareto inefficient because of mobility. The inefficiency can be thought of as an externality created by local income taxes; the Pigouvian solution thus becomes a natural corrective mechanism to recommend. Public policies such as equalizing grants and the deductibility of local taxes are compared to the Pigouvian solution.

THE MARKET VALUE OF ENVIRONMENTAL IMPROVEMENTS IN ALTERNATIVE FISCAL REGIMES*

ABSTRACT Land price differentials have long been used as a proxy for the value of environmental improvements in cost/benefit analysis. Both the empirical and theoretical literatures have largely ignored two important facts, however: Taxes financing local improvements are often distortionary, and amenities which influence property values in turn impact the fiscal budget, and hence the tax rate and final economic burden. Put another way, the economic cost of an improvement is endogenous to both the amenity level and the revenue structure. Extending the story in this direction for a system of open or closed spatial cities, the paper finds land rent measures to be a biased measure of the willingness to pay for amenities financed by either head taxes (benefit taxes), property taxes (excise taxes), or highway tolls (user fees). These results are used to correct the conventional specification of empirical property value regression models, which traditionally account for neither tax revenue effects nor the excess burden of distortionary taxation.

Universal health insurance in the Clinton plan: coverage as a tax-financed public good.

The financing arrangements embodied in the Clinton health reform plan involve some important differences in the way in which public goods are usually financed. The subsidies to small, low-wage firms mandated to provide benefits distort markets in both labor and products, and offer incentives for the creation of small firms. In addition, the financing scheme implicitly envisions a head tax on families at modest income levels but offers a possible rationale for it. Nevertheless, the main reason for many of the financing features appears to be an attempt to hold down the apparent budgetary cost of universal coverage.

Community choice of revenue instruments

This paper analyzes communities' choices of revenue instruments, such as property taxes, land taxes, housing revenues, fees, and head taxes, in an imperfect competition framework. Developer-dominated, or profit-maximizing communities generally prefer fees or charges to taxes; while voter-dominated, or utility-maximizing communities prefer taxes to fees. The impact of balanced budget constraints, restrictions on the choices of instruments, and public service choices are also analyzed.

TAX COMPETITION AMONG JURISDICTIONS WITH PUBLIC AND PRIVATE EMPLOYMENT

Models of interjurisdictional tax competition have focused generally on the effects of competition when all indi- viduals are alike. In this paper, individuals differ in their source of income, some being employed in the private sector, and others in the public sector. I show that if individuals are immobile between jurisdic- tions and constrained to remain in their current occupation, then private sector workers prefer head taxes be used in con- junction with subsidies to mobile capital. Public sector workers prefer to set the property tax at that rate which maximizes property tax revenue. If mobility between the public and private sectors is allowed, it is not possible to determine whether the property tax rate is higher or lower than that preferred by private sector workers in the immobility case, though it will never reach the revenue maximizing rate. Moreover, first best allocations of resources may require nonzero property taxation.

PRODUCER COOPERATIVES, INPUT PRICING AND LAND ALLOCATION

This paper considers input pricing rules for a producer cooperative which supplies its members with two inputs: a publicly provided private input (water), and a local public input (road services). An Israeli Moshav which allocates land equally among producers is a good example. The cooperative uses a two‐part pricing rule: a product‐dependent uniform fee (head tax) and a user charge per unit of the private input. Discrimination of head tax among the producer groups is shown to dominate that of user charge in the short run. However, land reallocation among producers can result in a Pareto‐superior pricing rule and the Henry George theorem emerges in the long run. Thus, allowing land leasing while maintaining equal rights to land increases producer welfare.

Property tax competition in a repeated game

Models of interjurisdictional tax competition have focused generally on the effects of competition on the supply of public goods in a single-period model. One clear result is that head/ benefit taxes lead to the efficient quantity of public good and that the optimal property tax rate is zero when benefit taxes are available. This paper shows if head taxes are available in a repeated game setting that property tax competition among jurisdictions leads to negative property tax rates; that is, subsidization of mobile capital by local governments. This result, which is not possible in the single-shot setting, results because capital which enters a jurisdiction in response to a subsidy remains there into the future generating greater output in more than just one time period. It is also shown in this context that collusion by local governments will be welfare enhancing.

Fiscal Inequivalence, Incentive Equivalence and Pareto Efficiency in a Decentralized Urban Context

We develop a simple urban model consisting of a center and a suburb, populated by a fixed number of identical individuals who can migrate costlessly between jurisdictions. Land ownership ranges from rent sharing to an absentee landlord who owns all urban land. We discuss laissez-faire equilibrium and show that it is Pareto efficient. We then introduce local governments which are only concerned about the welfare of their residents, and which can collect head and land taxes. Whereas the former is purely local, the latter will extend to both jurisdictions (if individuals own a positive share of the entire urban land) and beyond (if there is an absentee landlord). This produces a simple kind of fiscal inequivalence—tax-exporting. Since local governments do not provide public goods, their role is limited to stopping the flow of resources leaving their jurisdiction. They then redistribute this revenue as a head subsidy to the residents of their jurisdiction. If it just happens that the head subsidy is equal between jurisdictions, the equilibrium is both Pareto efficient and a preferable to laissez-faire from the viewpoint of urban residents. If however, it varies between jurisdictions, the equilibrium is Pareto inefficient: the jurisdiction providing a higher per head subsidy becomes overpopulated. We thus arrive at a classic market failure in the literature of competing regions. Correction involves aggregate interjurisdictional transfers to equalize head subsidies which, in the literature, must be undertaken by a central government. Following Myers [J. Public Econ., 43, 107–121 (1990)], we treat this as an assumption rather than a necessity. We show that if aggregate transfers become a local instrument, the Nash equilibrium will be both Pareto efficient and preferable to laissez-faire. This happens because free mobility compels noncooperative local governments to act in a cooperative way. We then extend this result to public goods which need be neither purely public (congestion) nor purely local (spillovers). We conclude by discussing implications for the existing urban literature.

Saving Francophone Africa's Statistical Past

Colonial administration, as every other administration, was built on the production and management of numbers: export figures (to assess the economic performance of each colony); population estimates, often falsely labeled “censuses” (to establish each colony's capacity to pay the head tax); school enrollment statistics (to establish budgets and document the road to “civilization”). French colonialism was probably one of the more centralized and number-producing systems. The regional (e.g., Dakar) and central (Paris) capitals were always requesting data for budgeting or simply for monitoring the evolution of each component of the empire.In the field of population statistics, before 1945 the process yielded very few reliable data, though a more systematic examination is required to be sure. Historically this can be explained by the evolution both of data collection and training in statistics in France during the first half of the twentieth century. The situation was well documented in the first decades of the century by Fernand Faure, a prominent member of the Société de Statistique de Paris, who noted that training in statistics was not very popular in the French civil service because no specific demand was made by higher levels of administrative or political power. Nevertheless, the Société and individuals in the Statistique Générale de France did succeed in pressing for the creation in 1922 of the Institut Supérieur de Statistique de l'Université de Paris (ISUP), but the lack of means at the institute made it virtually impossible for it to meet its training objectives.

The Commutation of Suai from Northeast Siam in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century

The main characteristic of the Thai economy in the early Rattanakosin period, especially the extent of the development of overseas trade and its effect on the domestic economy and the peasantry in particular, has become one of the points of interest among scholars of Thai history in the past decade. This paper attempts to reconsider this question by examining the existing documents on suai (head tax in kind) sent from northeast Siam to Bangkok between the 1830s and the 1860s. The region canvassed here includes areas on both sides of the Mekong valley, i.e. the Eastern Lao provinces (huamuang lao fai tawan-k) and the Forest Khmer provinces (huamuiang khamen padong).

Simple normative rules imply simple positive rules

When n policy instruments must be chosen, the set of Pareto optima is defined as simple if it can be spanned by two vectors. (An example would be a head tax and a uniform sales tax.) It is shown that majority rule must result in a Condorcet winner, the preferred policy of the median voter, if the set of Pareto optima is simple.

On income taxation and the core

The core of an (optimal) income tax economy is examined. In such economies, optima are usually second best because the identities of the agents are not known to the government. Although it is generally unclear how to handle information problems in cooperative games such as the one examined here, two core concepts are explored. For the first concept, incentive compatibility is imposed only within potential blocking coalitions, and the core consists only of head taxes or is empty if there are no increasing returns to coalition size. For the second concept, incentive compatibility is also imposed for potential entrants into blocking coalitions, and the core is shown to be empty for a simple, reasonable, and interesting class of models.

The Dynamic of Indian Demographic Collapse in the San Francisco Bay Missions, Alta California, 1776-1840

New Spain (modemrn Mexico), duplicating the patterns of exploitation already developed in the central region of the colony. Surplus labor and goods extracted from the peasant economies of central New Spain were crucial for the development of the colonial economy. The pattern of settlement in compact communities facilitated the collection of tribute (head tax imposed on the Indian population) and the organization of labor drafts (repartimientos) for public works, the construction of churches, and labor in agriculture and the all-important mines. When the Indian peoples of central New Spain experienced rapid demographic collapse, civil and religious officials recreated spatially compact communities through the policy of congregaci6n, the resettlement of Indian populations into new communities.

The Decline of Property Rights in Man in Thailand, 1800–1913

Like many land-abundant, labor-scarce economies, Thailand had a well-developed system of property rights in man. Over the nineteenth century corvée and slavery were abolished and replaced by military conscription, a head tax, and more precise property rights in land. Concomitant trends included extensive commercialization, the growth of international trade, imperialist threats to Thai sovereignty, and the growth of a centralized unitary state. Both domestic and international political motives influenced monarchs in the abolition of human-property rights. Economic change greatly facilitated these institutional changes.