scheme would deter landowners from under-assessing their property, and the annual tax would discourage them from over-valuation. The origin of Sun's self-assessment method is not clear. In 1891, New Zealand passed a Land and Income Tax Act, based on a"self-assessment with the shrewd device of making Government's purchase at the tax value an effective check on the owner's assessment" (Condliffe 1930: 182). Although remarkably similar to Sun's proposal, no evidence indicates a connection between the two. Others have argued for similar schemes for the taxation of economic rent. Harberger (1965), in his study of Latin America tax reform, proposed a variation of Sun's scheme. Under his scheme, each property owner publicly declares the value of his own property, and is required to sell his property to any bidder who is willing to pay, say, 20 per cent more than the declared value. He argues that this simple scheme is self-enforcing, allows no scope for corruption, has negligible costs of administration, and creates incentives for efficient allocation of each property. Nuti (1988) recently suggests a procedure for capital valuation and interfirm mobility in Soviet-style enterprises. He argues that the investment miscalculation and mismanagement created by the lack of a stock market in planned economies can be eradicated only if enterprises are penalized for their failure to maintain the market value of the investment and for their inability to utilize it better than other enterprises. He proposed that enterprise managers assess the current value of their productive assets and register it with a central public record office. Subsequently, any other state enterprise can bid for the enterprise's productive assets. The challenged enterprise either revises the valuation of its assets to equal the highest bid or it has to sell the assets at * The authors thank William Bernhard and Peter Ordeshook for their helpful comments.