During 2011 and 2012, the Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance (IMFG) hosted a speakers’ series called Moving our Region on funding regional transportation. This report distills the key lessons from the series.
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Business property taxes in Ontario have fallen dramatically in the past decade, due to a series of reforms mandated by the provincial government. This paper discusses the likely impacts of the reforms on business location, wages, and land values, and the economic welfare of provincial residents.
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Baumeister’s paper suggests policy changes for using the development charge as a planning tool. Burgess reviews the risks to Canadian municipal finance from extreme weather and analyzes the financial tools that cities can use to prepare for extreme weather events.
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This paper reviews the evolution and current state of subnational taxation in five large emerging countries: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and Nigeria—BRIC plus one. As these case studies show, intergovernmental fiscal relations in any country are inevitably both path-dependent and context-sensitive.
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The Nordic countries are small, unitary, and have largely homogeneous populations. Municipalities are the most important agents in the decentralized public sector. There are lessons to be learned from country to country in the field of local government financing, but comparisons need to be made with care.
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In 2012, Vietnam will celebrate 25 years of economic reform and structural readjustment from a largely centralized, subsidized economy to one based on market principles. This paper reviews existing property-based taxes and outlines the potential for a land tax to effectively replace the current property tax.
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This book examines the broad reform of the Ontario property tax in 1998. The objectives of this reform included introducing a full market value assessment, establishing a property tax system that would be widely accepted, and removing property tax reform from the provincial political agenda. Although the reform effort was lauded by experts at the time, its overall objectives were not achieved. In fact, the new assessment system may have ultimately weakened the role of the local property tax. Good property tax design needs to recognize the important differences between taxing housing and taxing business property.
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There is little evidence of regional, let alone worldwide, trends in local finances. In analyzing and comparing country experiences, it is important to be clear about the different (implicit or explicit) normative models to be found in the literature and exemplified in practice in different countries.
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