Overview of property taxation systems

Abstract

Property taxes are one of the traditional revenue sources for most governments of the world, and have existed for a very long time. The tax is collected at different administration levels, ranging from the national to the federal to the state/county/region to the municipality. According to a United Nations Human Settlements Program report, property tax is widely implied and generally accepted to be a combined assessed value of land, buildings that it contains and any improvements made thereto (UN-HABITAT 2011a). Excluding the notion of land value taxation, property tax attempts to generate revenues from structures and land improvements, although the latter part has given rise to debates on its fairness. In the developed countries property tax is usually ad valorem, or market value based, since this is considered to be fairer than other methods. This paper categories various types of property types as they are applied in different nations, with special emphasis on the EU region.