General Property Reassessment: Relative Tax Impacts on Land and on Structures

A bstract . Many jurisdictions require periodic mass reassessment of real property to bring assessed values closer to market values and to reallocate tax burdens among property types. This paper examines the influence of general reassessment on the tax burden on land relative to that on improvements in Indiana, a state using elected local assessors, statewide mass reassessment on a regular cycle, and assessment of structures at hypothetical reproduction cost. Examination of data over the 1950-51 to 1974-75 period shows that economic growth and development reallocates property tax impact away from land: the share of land in the base declines and the effective rate paid on any given parcel of land declines. Reassessment adjusts these impacts. While reassessment increases the share of improvements in the total base, the readjustment for land is larger. From this analysis, the most recent mass assessment (1968) increased the land to improvement ratio by about 42 percent.     

Fiscal disparity and equalisation in the Russian Federation

The regions of the Russian Federation are economically disparate. Differential endowment with energy resources drives much of this disparity and this translates into highly diverse fiscal capacities. Although regions do have some independent revenue-raising authority, all taxes are administered by the national Ministry of Taxation and a sizable share (roughly 45%) of total national revenue is transferred to regional and local government. The transfers, however, are not of equal importance to all regions. This article focuses on vertical and horizontal balance in the country. It examines differential revenue capacity and the extent to which national transfer programmes mitigate fiscal disparity.     

BRETTON WOODS - ORIGINAL INTENTIONS AND CURRENT PROBLEMS

The Bretton Woods institutions have been subjected to a variety of criticisms in recent years and have been faced with severe problems in carrying out their objectives. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank have not performed in accordance with the original intentions of their founders. As shown in this article, this is in large measure because the world economic environment has been quite different from that envisaged by the participants in the Bretton Woods conference. Many of the original intended functions for these institutions are no longer relevant. This article examines the current problems facing the IMF and World Bank, with special attention to how they are related to the original intentions. For example, in recent years, a major problem has been the financial crises of member countries that have liberalized their economies in line with trends toward globalization. These crises have resulted in demands on the IMF and World Bank for financial assistance for purposes other than those for which their assistance was originally designed. Other problems of the two institutions include providing assistance to the world's poorest countries that have made virtually no development progress in recent years, and assisting the former communist countries in transition to market economies. The author gives his personal views on how these and other problems of the IMF and World Bank should be dealt with.     

INCREASING STREAMFLOW TO SUSTAIN SALMON AND OTHER NATIVE FISH IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST

According to biologists, increasing streamflows is among the measures necessary to protect salmon and other native fish in the Pacific Northwest. Yet our understanding of the costs and most cost-effective approaches is hampered by lack of comparative experience. This article attempts to address both of these issues. The analysis finds that the costs of streamflow augmentation may be modest, between $1 and $10 per capita per year for the region. Apart from largE-scale actions on the Snake and Columbia Rivers, we find that streamflow augmentation will require decentralized approaches, and their cost-effective implementation will require localized scientific information, constant monitoring, and hands-on management to acquire water through purchases, leases, and contingent contracts when and where appropriate.     

state Lotteries and Crime

A bstract . The impact of having a state lottery on the rate of crime against property in that state is estimated. Arguments in the standard economic model of criminal activity employed here include the unemployment rate, real income per capita, presence of the death penalty in the state as a proxy for general severity of punishment , police officers per capita, the percentage of population between the ages of 5 and 24, and the presence of a state lottery. Because the decision of a state to operate a lottery may correlate with crime rates, a selectivity model was run to extract any bias, but no such bias was found. The analysis used data for the 50 states plus the District of Columbia from 1970 through 1984. The results suggest that presence of a state lottery is associated with a crime rate higher by about 3 percent, an effect both statistically significant and practically important.     

PROJECT EVALUATION AND RESOURCE SUSTAINABILITY

This paper outlines a procedure for embodying the principle of resource sustainability in evaluating projects that use significant amounts of natural resources. In this analysis, sustainability requires maintaining the productivity of the resource used over time, either by renewing the resource or by investing its depletion in other capital assets. The basis of a project's evaluation is its net present social value (NPSV), including resource depletion as a social cost. The social cost of depletion is the amount that must be saved and reinvested annually to accumulate a fund that will yield a perpetual annual income equal to the net output lost by resource depletion. By treating resource depletion as a social cost in calculating NPSV, projects causing a high rate of resource depletion receive a relatively low valuation compared with projects causing less resource depletion. Resource depletion includes environmental damage caused by constructing and operating a project, as well as the direct consumption of natural resources.
Several problems arise in reinvesting depletion to preserve the value of a resource base. One major problem relates to the substitutability of man-made capital for natural resources. The conclusion of the analysis here is that society must invest a substantial amount of resource depletion in: (i) replenishing renewable resources, (ii) increasing product output per unit of resource used, or (Hi) increasing the end-use efficiency of resource-intensive products.