Real Estate Taxes And Urban Sprawl

With the rapid economic growth,the pace of urbanization in China is also rapidly advancing,the achievements have attracted worldwide attention.But with the rapid development of urbanization,the city spatial size sprawls fastly,which led to a series of economic and social problems.It is important to control city spatial size reasonably and use the urban land resources efficiently.The real estate taxes have the function of encouraging intensive land use and retarding urban sprawl,but this function has been overlooked in theoretical research and policy practice.Therefor,it is of theoretical and practical significance to study the relationship between real estate taxes and urban sprawl,which may provide the important support and reference for the theoretical analysis and policy practice of the real estate taxes.The paper analyzes the characteristics and efficiency of urban sprawl after recapitulating the related literature and describing the international comparison of real estate taxes.Then based on the datas of 35 large and medium-sized cities in China,this paper analyzes the impacts of real estate taxes on urban sprawl through using sys-GMM estimation.And then,by setting the indexes that reflecting the total effect,dwelling size effect and the improvement effect of the real estate taxes on urban sprawl,this paper uses panel fixed effect model to explains the reason why real estate taxes did not retard urban sprawl.Finally,taking the pilot reform of individual housing property taxes in city of Shanghai and Chongqing as a natural experiment,this paper analyzes the impacts of the pilot reform of the real estate tax on urban sprawl by applying the synthetic control method.The conclusion as follows.First of all,the city spatial size represented by built-up area is expanding continually.The speed of sprawl has been accelerating since 2000.Especially,the big cities expand faster than others.By calculating the primate city index,Zipf index and city Gini coefficient,we find that the faster sprawl in big cities deteriorates the imbalance of all cities.In terms of efficiency,the growth rate of built-up area sprawl is far higher than the population,which lead to the inefficiency of urban sprawl,especially in the western cities,where existing the risks of departure from economic development.Secondly,the established city size,population and the convenience of urban transport facilities are important reasons for urban sprawl,land transfer fee also significantly encouraging the urban sprawl.Simultaneously,real estate taxes did not retard the urban sprawl.And in different links,the real estate taxes have significantly different impacts on urban sprawl,wherein the holding part,the real estate taxes are conducive to curb urban sprawl,but the impacts was not obvious in transfer part.Moreover,there are significantly different impacts of real estate taxes and land transfer fee on urban sprawl for different regions and cities.Thirdly,the reason of real estate taxes did not retard the urban sprawl is that the dwelling size effect is positive significantly and the improvement effect is negative significantly,the absolute value of both of the coefficient is closer,which means that it is difficult to retard urban sprawl by real estate taxes.This may be related to the real estate tax systerms.Fourth,the pilot reform of individual housing property taxes in Chongqing can significantly retard urban sprawl.This may be because of the special preferential policies in Chongqing,that is guaranteeing 100 square meters’ tax relief for the city residents to buy single-family commercial houses and high-end houses,which lead consumers to prefer small and medium-sized residential house in order to avoid the undue taxation.