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A few years ago I read an article that argued that one of the best ways to help many African countries would be to send accountants and help set up a cadastre.
by gpvos 6y ago
A few years ago I read an article that argued that one of the best ways to help many African countries would be to send accountants and help set up a cadastre.
- true_religion 6y agoIt’s been tried but the political opposition is massive for various reasons.
- crakenzak 6y agoI find this very interesting, why do you think there’s opposition to it? So property owners don’t get taxed on the real value of their assets?
- paganel 6y ago> why do you think there’s opposition to it? There's still lots of small property owners that are still poor that would prefer not paying taxes on their small holdings.
- pjc50 6y agoNot everywhere has US style property taxes. More likely the problem relates to ownership and title: quite likely a lot of property will technically be squatting. The book "The Other Path" by Hernando de Soto goes into this; the best solution is to award title to long term occupiers.
- true_religion 6y agoFor instance in Ghana, most land is leasehold not freehold due to the fact that land historically belonged to a family group or community rather than a person. Thus central government schemes to tax land have two arguments against them. First is that no one knows who will be taxed, and since who is taxed is synonymous with who owns the property that’s an added problem as people believe they are being unfairly deprived of their birth rights. Secondly, taxing property which is leasehold is problematic as the people making use of the land aren’t the owners. The owners have generally already spent the leasehold advance, and in the case of 99 year leases are likely already dead. So, the only people you can collect from are the tenants which leads you right back into problem 1. In practice though, people pay property tax on assessed value of buildings, but it’s not the same as land tax so an unfinished building can be counted as worthless depending on its state.
- justcurious33 6y agoAs opposed to vaccinating them, building infrastructure for them, defending them from Jihadis in the Sahel, etc. I’m honestly completely indifferent to colonialism (I’m neither for or against); I just don’t like hypocrisy. If you want to do it, do it, but please call it what it is.
- redis_mlc 6y ago> building infrastructure for them That's what they're discussing, SJW.
- staticautomatic 6y agoIn case anyone else doesn’t know the word cadastre: > a register of property showing the extent, value, and ownership of land for taxation.
- edoceo 6y agoEngland called theirs Domesday (Doomsday) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesday_Book https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesday_Book
- simonh 6y agoNowadays it’s the Land Registry. It would be pretty cool if we did call it the Domesday Book, but alas..
- mattmanser 6y agoOur land registry is really dodgy and enables corruption though, and not one to emulate.
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoAnd if that is set up properly, you can combine it with o make some great interactive visulalizations like https://3dbag.nl/en/viewer https://3dbag.nl/en/viewer
- kqr 6y agoThis article, coupled with the ideas in Lombard Street, makes it sound like the lack of deposit banking is another big problem. Unfortunately, if it's cultural (you owe your relatives any spare liquid capital you have) then I don't know how to fix it.
- blaser-waffle 6y agoMuch of Africa's banking infrastructure is handled by cell phones.
- eraserj 6y agoGhana and DRC are trying to set up a cadastre using blockchain, let's see how it goes.
- throwaway210222 6y agoMany a Zimbabwean will tell you that none of this matters if the local police refuse to arrest people (violently) contesting your ownership. In fact, the police (and local politicians) are often present to contribute to the threat.
- yhoiseth 6y agoGreat podcast episode/book chapter by Tim Harford on the value of a property register (9 minutes): https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csv3gt https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csv3gt
- febeling 6y agoThat sounds like the conclusion from the book The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, by Hernando de Soto (2000). In his research he found that the legal system around property was very ineffective for poor people and many developing countries. They followed real life cases trying to bring properties/businesses from the informal sector to being fully registered and taxed. It was often a many year process and expensive. Owners would also have preferred to pay taxed when getting access to fully legal status, access to banking and capital markets an important one. Findings where from places like Peru, Egypt, Philippines (if memory serves me), and contrasted with places like US, Germany, England, Sweden, and Japan. The latter mostly had a well structured, democratic system of property law and registries available to everyone, not just the wealthy or powerful. Edit: Another key element was to open a process to convert squatted land into legal property. Many times formal land ownership was not conforming to lived reality, and some legal title nobody was interested in any longer was blocking legalization of actual use. US homesteading regulations are one example of how that was done, but all western countries mentioned earlier have or had equivalent processes.
- quantum_solanum 6y ago> Another key element was to open a process to convert squatted land into legal property. Many times formal land ownership was not conforming to lived reality, and some legal title nobody was interested in any longer was blocking legalization of actual use. the process: https://allthatsinteresting.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/manifest-destiny-og.jpg https://allthatsinteresting.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads...
- gpvos 6y agoIt was probably this one (Dutch): https://decorrespondent.nl/4060/wat-is-oersaai-en-gaat-de-wereld-redden-hint-wij-hebben-er-een-hekel-aan/176898260-3568e571 https://decorrespondent.nl/4060/wat-is-oersaai-en-gaat-de-we... It actually argued for lots more bureaucracy, not accountants particularly. And for a cadastre / land registry. And indeed mentions Hernando de Soto's work in Peru and Egypt.
- globular-toast 6y agoLike they have in South Africa? That's going well...
- mikro2nd 6y agoNot sure what you're referring to, since South Africa has had a well-ordered and fully functional cadastre for well over a century (to my knowledge, probably quite a lot longer).
- globular-toast 6y agoYeah, it's also had money for at least that long too. I was referring to it having one of the highest crime rates in the world and the highest inequality coefficient by a considerable margin.
- ArnoVW 6y agoThis was a theory of Hernando De Soto in the 90's. He produced quite a bit of research / statistics on the subject, doing surveys over 100 countries. If you want to read about him, there is this article [1] I remember watching a documentary where they reproduced his experiment. Essentially, send a team of students in each country on a mission : create a company. I've done it in the UK, it's one day and 70 pounds. In the documentary they showed the complexities for just the administrative act of "creating a company" in (I believe) Argentina. It took them 3 months. [1] https://www.investors.com/news/management/leaders-and-success/hernando-de-soto-revolutionized-world-thinking-poverty/ https://www.investors.com/news/management/leaders-and-succes...