The Principles of Land Value Capture in the Perspective of Georgist Political Economy (K'Akumu, 2024)
A taxonomic review distinguishing Georgist land value capture — site value taxation, associated with Henry George — from non-Georgist betterment strategies like planning-gain levies and special-assessment rates, aimed at ending a 'fragmentary understanding' of land value capture as a phenomenon.
Summary
"The principles of land value capture in the perspective of Georgist political economy," by Owiti A. K'Akumu, appeared in Planning Perspectives 40(2): 265–282 (2024). It is a companion piece to the wiki's existing K'Akumu: Kenya Site Value Tax page (a 2026 case study on colonial-era site-value-tax diffusion) by the same author, but with a different, more foundational scope: a taxonomic review of land value capture as a general policy category.
The Taxonomy
Per the paper's abstract, the article "tackles the question of unearned increment that accrues to landowners in urban situations in terms of uplifts in land values" by "undertaking a taxonomic examination of LVC strategies and instruments to end a fragmentary understanding of the phenomenon." Its central move is to identify Georgist and non-Georgist typologies of unearned increment, paying particular attention to the tax-based strategy of LVC — site value taxation, "mainly associated with Henry George" — and drawing conceptual distinctions between this and betterment-family instruments: planning-gain levies and special-assessment rates, which capture value at the point of a specific development decision rather than through a standing, recurring tax on land value generally.
Relation to the Georgist Case
This directly strengthens the wiki's land value capture, site value, and betterment levy pages, which document many individual LVC instruments and case studies but had not previously carried a single unifying taxonomy distinguishing the Georgist site-value-tax tradition from the broader, non-Georgist betterment-capture family those other instruments belong to. It pairs naturally with the wiki's existing K'Akumu Kenya case study, extending the same author's research program from a specific national case into a general conceptual framework.
Nuances and Limits
- A taxonomic/theoretical review, not new empirical data. The paper's contribution is conceptual clarification and categorization, not a new dataset or case study.
- Abstract-level source (B-claim, upgraded from a fully verbatim abstract). The publisher page was blocked to this session; this page is built from the paper's verbatim abstract obtained via the Semantic Scholar API, not the paper's full development of the taxonomy.
- Publication year note. The scanner's original metadata listed 2025; Semantic Scholar and Crossref both confirm 2024 as the actual publication year, corrected here.
Bears On
- Concept: Land Value Capture — supplies a unifying taxonomy distinguishing the Georgist site-value-tax tradition from the broader betterment-capture family of instruments the page otherwise documents case-by-case.
- Concept: Site Value — the specifically Georgist LVC strategy this taxonomy centers.
- Concept: Betterment Levy — the non-Georgist, event-based capture family this taxonomy distinguishes from standing site-value taxation.
See Also
Sources
- Owiti A. K'Akumu (2024), "The principles of land value capture in the perspective of Georgist political economy," Planning Perspectives 40(2): 265–282, DOI 10.1080/02665433.2024.2386685. doi.org — fetch blocked (403) to this session 2026-08-30; verbatim abstract obtained via the Semantic Scholar API — used for the taxonomic-review framing, the Georgist/non-Georgist unearned-increment typology, and the site-value-tax-vs-betterment distinction, all quoted directly from the abstract above (B-claim; abstract-level, full text not read).