The Taxable Capacity of Australian Land and Resources (Dwyer)

Summary

Terry (Terence) Dwyer's "The Taxable Capacity of Australian Land and Resources" (Australian Tax Forum 18(1), 2003) reconstructs a time series of Australian land values across most of the twentieth century and compares land income to total tax revenue, concluding the base is substantially larger than conventional measures suggest — the most-cited national revenue-capacity calculation in the modern Georgist literature.[1] It underpins later Australian work (Fitzgerald's Total Resource Rents of Australia) and is cited in Doucet's Land is a Big Deal (Ch. 14); Dwyer also supplies the "superneutrality" argument carried in the Corruption of Economics postscript.[2]

Headline figures (direct read). Dwyer estimates "smoothed" land income as an assumed 5% current yield on land values plus an accrual yield from long-run land-value growth, then benchmarks it against all Australian taxes over 1910–11 to 1998–99. The striking result is how large land income is relative to the entire tax take: total Australian taxes peaked at 400.4% of land income in 1951–52 but had fallen to 138.3% of land income by 1994–95 — i.e., land income already amounted to roughly 70% of all tax revenue, despite the postwar growth of the welfare state, and comfortably exceeded personal income tax or company tax individually. Dwyer's three core conclusions: (1) land values are high enough that "any reasonable estimate of returns to landholding" shows a large capacity for land-value taxation to replace personal income or company taxes; (2) land values grow strongly enough to make land taxes a buoyant revenue source; and (3) official figures understate land values by using conservative valuations and omitting sub-soil, fishery, and spectrum assets. He also stresses that much public spending (infrastructure and even social transfers) is recaptured in land values, so land income tends to keep pace with tax revenue.

See Also

• Dwyer (1980): A History of the Theory of Land Value Taxation — Dwyer's earlier Harvard dissertation that this page says supplies the 'superneutrality' argument
• Land rent could fund government — the outcome this bears on
• ATCOR · Objection: LVT can't raise enough revenue

Sources

1. Terry (Terence) Dwyer, "The Taxable Capacity of Australian Land and Resources," Australian Tax Forum 18(1), 2003. PDF (Prosper mirror) (returned HTTP 403 in this pass) · PDF (EarthSharing mirror, full text read) — used for thesis, venue, methodology (5% current yield + accrual yield), the land-income-vs-tax-revenue series (400.4% in 1951–52 → 138.3% in 1994–95), and the paper's three core conclusions.
2. Mason Gaffney & Fred Harrison, The Corruption of Economics (1994 / 2022 postscript) — used for Dwyer's superneutrality argument (A-claim with book locator). Book page