Property taxes are part of all tax systems in the European Union and should, like other taxes, fulfill a number of functions, including redistributive and stabilizing functions. The main goal of this thesis is to assess the extent to which the selected countries fulfill redistributive and stabilizing functions. I express the fulfillment of the redistributive function by means of a cross-sectional regression analysis of the share of property tax revenues in GDP and the Gini coefficient, with the ... show full abstractProperty taxes are part of all tax systems in the European Union and should, like other taxes, fulfill a number of functions, including redistributive and stabilizing functions. The main goal of this thesis is to assess the extent to which the selected countries fulfill redistributive and stabilizing functions. I express the fulfillment of the redistributive function by means of a cross-sectional regression analysis of the share of property tax revenues in GDP and the Gini coefficient, with the Gini coefficient as the dependent variable. I will use the elasticity of property tax revenues to the size of production gaps to describe the stabilization function, with the share of property tax revenues to GDP as the dependent variable, and I will conduct this analysis for each selected country. In the first part of the thesis I will focus on the theoretical definition of taxes in general and then describe property taxes and their categorization according to the OECD. I will describe the individual categories of property taxes in detail. The next section focuses on the fiscal significance of property taxes, where I compare property tax revenues at the national and local government levels. The final section is devoted to analyses that address the main goals of the thesis. |