When Tax Authority and Land Authority Diverge: Property Tax Reform in Ghana (King, 2026)

Summary

Godswill Dormenyo King, "When tax authority and land authority diverge: property tax reform and institutional persistence in Ghana," Journal of Institutional Economics 22 (2026), article e59, published online 22 October 2026, asks why Ghana's weak, building-focused property rating regime has lasted despite the fiscal case for bringing land value into local revenue.

Its answer is a concept, tax authority/land authority divergence: public institutions hold formal power to tax property, while the authority to "define, allocate, legitimate, or disclose land rights" remains partly with customary or informal institutions (Introduction). In Ghana, Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs) have statutory authority to levy property rates under the Local Governance Act 2016, but stools, skins, families and other landholding groups keep influence over allocation, recognition of rights and the legitimacy of transactions (Methodology, "Case selection"). The consequence, on the article's account, is a rating regime tied to buildings, fiscally weak but institutionally durable, with land value largely outside the recurrent local base.

Method and Data

The study is a qualitative case study combining documentary analysis (legislation, policy documents, institutional reports, historical materials), field observations and 32 formal semi-structured interviews held in Ghana between May and September 2022 (Methodology, "Research design and data sources").

Table 1 breaks the 32 interviewees down as 13 tax and land policy experts, 7 district assembly officials, 2 each from the valuation, registration, survey and mapping, and planning bodies, and 1 each from public and vested land management, the Office of the Administrator of Stool Lands, a Customary Land Secretariat, and a landowning chief or family. The historical evidence covers the colonial episodes of 1894, 1897 and 1912, then post-independence decentralisation and the land governance reforms of 1992-2020 (Findings, Table 3).

Findings

The formal base. Under the Local Governance Act 2016, as the article reports it, general rates are payable by the owner and levied on rateable value. Rateable premises are buildings, structures or similar developments, and rateable value follows their replacement cost after depreciation. The main recurrent base is therefore "anchored to buildings, structures, and structural development rather than the unimproved value of land itself" (Findings, "Formal tax authority, the property rating base, and weak fiscal reach").

Mechanisms. The abstract names information, valuation evidence, liability, legitimacy and revenue expectations.

• Information. A registration official says the title register lacks land-use and price data, holding only stamp-duty information "typically a fraction of the actual land price"; a policy expert says chief-allocated land reaches the registries only if the recipient registers it (Findings, "Land information and the limits of formal tax authority").
• Valuation evidence and liability. A valuation official describes indeterminate boundaries and family allocations without individual title. A landowning-group representative says: "we do not disclose information on the prices during our transactions," although the secretariat records buyers' names (Findings, "Valuation evidence, liability, and transaction transparency").
• Legitimacy. The same representative says land tax "is something our ancestors have always fought against" and calls local governments corrupt. A policy expert expects chiefs to resist; a land administrator sees fiscal pressure as "a golden opportunity" (Findings, "Legitimacy, political feasibility, and variation across respondents").
• Revenue expectations. The Discussion ties legitimacy to family interests, stool land revenue and customary claims, which a recurrent local levy on land value could disturb.

Historical persistence. The Crown Lands Bill 1894 and Lands Bill 1897 treated unoccupied land as Crown land and met organised opposition. Cape Coast petitioned against direct taxation after the Municipalities Ordinance of 1889, and "by 1912, proposals for a land tax intended to encourage productive land use generated renewed opposition from chiefs" (Findings, "Historical reproduction of land sensitivity and the rating settlement"). Drawing on historical institutionalism, the author reads the building-focused regime as a "manageable institutional settlement": legally established, administratively routine and less disruptive than land-based reform.

Land or site value. The article uses land value tax narrowly, as a recurrent tax on the unimproved value of land excluding buildings, citing George (1879) for the Georgist tradition (Framework, "Legal pluralism, customary authority, and land governance"). Raising building rates would leave the "site value created through urban growth" and speculative holding of undeveloped land only weakly captured (Findings, first subsection). It calls full LVT, split-rate taxation, vacant-land taxes and betterment charges "not institutionally equivalent," yet each needs reliable land information, defensible valuation, identifiable liability and legitimacy (Discussion).

The 3.5 per cent Figure

The article states that between 2010 and 2016 property taxes "averaged less than a fifth of internally generated funds and only 3.5% of total local government revenue," and have been estimated at about 0.02 per cent of GDP (Introduction). The article attributes this to Oppong (2021) and Bahl (2009). Its Table 2, sourced to Oppong, gives annual shares of total local government revenue between 2.9 per cent (2007) and 4.2 per cent (2012). These are another author's data, reproduced by the article, not its own measurement.

Relation to the Georgist Case

For the Georgist case the article concerns institutional preconditions. A land-based tax needs land information, defensible valuation, identifiable liable parties, enforceable collection and acceptance by landholders; in Ghana's plural-tenure setting these sit with different authorities, so a formal power to tax does not deliver them. The article's reform conclusions: land-based taxation "cannot be treated as a mere technical adjustment"; better rolls, records, billing, digitisation and enforcement are necessary but "unlikely to be sufficient"; and reform would need clearer information-sharing, credible engagement with customary land institutions, visible links between local tax revenue and services, and careful sequencing (Conclusion).

It bears on the objection that land cannot be assessed at one point. That objection usually concerns technique, such as separating land from building value; this study documents an earlier problem, missing transaction-price evidence and unclear interests. It does not address the separation problem, since Ghana's base does not value land.

The study is a qualitative account of one country. It is not evidence that a land value tax would work in Ghana, nor that it would fail: it tests no tax and measures no outcome.

Nuances and Limits

• Qualitative and interpretive. The mechanism is argued from interviews and documents, not tested.
• Few customary voices. Only two interviewees were customary actors, a Customary Land Secretariat representative and a landowning chief or family representative. The article says it does not claim to cover all customary authorities' views (Methodology, "Limitations").
• Single country, 2022 fieldwork. Whether similar divergences explain weak property taxes elsewhere is left to future research (Conclusion).
• Secondary figures. The revenue figures come from other work; the statutory description is the article's reading of the Act, without section numbers.
• Author and standing. The author is at Sheffield Hallam University, and the article states that it is based on doctoral research undertaken at the University of Reading. It is cited as a peer-reviewed article in a recognised journal, not as an authority on land taxation.

See Also

• Property Tax in Africa (Franzsen & McCluskey, 2017) — the 29-country survey that records customary tenure as a base constraint; this article adds a causal mechanism for one case
• The State Capacity Ceiling (Bergeron, Tourek & Weigel) — field-experimental evidence that enforcement capacity limits property taxation in a low-capacity setting
• Taxing Property in Developing Countries (Brockmeyer et al.) — welfare effects of property tax rates and enforcement in Mexico
• Pakistan — a country page where valuation and land records are the weak points of the property tax
• Obeng-Odoom (2026): Progress and Poverty — Walter Rodney's Legacy — a Ghanaian-Australian scholar on land dispossession and Georgism; the King article cites his work on Ghanaian land reform
• K'Akumu: Georgist Political Economy of Land Value Capture — taxonomy separating site value taxation from other land value capture instruments
• Objection: Land value can't be assessed accurately

Sources

1. Godswill Dormenyo King (2026), "When tax authority and land authority diverge: property tax reform and institutional persistence in Ghana," Journal of Institutional Economics 22, e59, Cambridge University Press, published online 22 October 2026, DOI 10.1017/S1744137426100964, CC BY 4.0. Section headings are used as locators because the Cambridge Core HTML text carries no page numbers — used for the concept, method, interview breakdown, institutional findings, history and reform conclusions (B-claim; qualitative case study; Tier 1 by peer-reviewed venue, the article's own statement of the author's affiliation and doctoral basis; read in full), and for the statutory description of MMDA authority and the rating base as the article reports the Local Governance Act 2016, and for the historical dates (A-claim, as reported; the Act itself was not consulted).
2. Francis Oppong (2021), "An analysis of the impact of jurisdictional fragmentation on property taxes in Ghana," Journal of Financial Management of Property and Construction 26(2): 219-235, DOI 10.1108/JFMPC-07-2020-0048 — used only for the 3.5 per cent and Table 2 revenue figures, as cited in source 1 (B-claim, secondary; not read directly). The 0.02 per cent of GDP estimate is attributed in source 1 to Oppong (2021) and Bahl (2009).