City-Size Tax, Henry George and Urban Scaling (Webster, Chen, Zhang, Chau & Ren, 2025)
Proposes a 'city-size adjusted mean social surplus indicator' as the base for a land value tax calibrated to the power-law relationship between city size and unearned agglomeration benefits — an explicit modern route toward what the authors call a 'Georgist tax,' aimed at housing unaffordability.
Summary
"City-Size Tax, Henry George and Urban Scaling," by Chris Webster, Chen Chen, Xiaohu Zhang, K.W. Chau, and Chuyuan Ren, is a Research Square preprint (posted August 2025, not yet peer-reviewed). It connects two literatures the wiki has covered separately — optimal city size theory and the empirical urban scaling laws literature (power-law relationships between city population and aggregate social/economic output) — into a concrete land-value-tax design proposal.
The Proposal
Per the paper's framing, cities generate "unearned urban public goods benefits derived from city agglomeration economies that rise with city size by a regular scale-free power law." Because these agglomeration benefits are not earned by any individual landowner but instead accrue from the city's aggregate scale, the authors propose a "city-size adjusted mean social surplus indicator" that could serve as the base for a land value tax calibrated to the expected differences in "windfall agglomeration benefits" across a country's full city-size gradient — larger cities, which capture disproportionately more of the scaling benefit, would face a correspondingly higher land-value-tax calibration than smaller ones. The authors frame the goal explicitly as a modern route toward "a Georgist tax," and argue it could help address housing unaffordability, property bubbles and crashes, regional disparities, imbalanced primate-city systems, and over-stretched urban public services.
Relation to the Georgist Case
This is a direct, quantitative extension of the wiki's Henry George Theorem and optimal city size coverage: where those pages establish that aggregate land rent should, under the right conditions, equal optimal public-goods spending, this paper proposes an empirically measurable, scale-calibrated indicator that could operationalize that logic across an entire national urban system rather than one city in isolation — using the urban scaling literature's well-documented power-law regularities as the calibration mechanism.
Nuances and Limits
- An unreviewed preprint (posted to Research Square, not a journal). The specific indicator's construction and any empirical validation should be treated as provisional until peer review.
- A theoretical/design proposal, not a policy already tested anywhere. No jurisdiction is known to have implemented a city-size-scaled LVT of this kind.
- Abstract-level source (B-claim). The publisher page was blocked to this session; this page is built from a WebSearch reconstruction of the paper's abstract, not a full read of its methodology or empirical calibration.
Bears On
- Concept: Henry George Theorem — proposes an empirical calibration mechanism (urban scaling laws) for the theorem's public-goods-from-rent logic across an entire national city system.
- Concept: Optimal City Size — extends single-city optimal-size theory into a national-scale, empirically calibrated tax design.
- Concept: Agglomeration Economies — the productivity-spillover mechanism whose power-law regularity this paper proposes as the tax base's calibration source.
See Also
Sources
- Chris Webster, Chen Chen, Xiaohu Zhang, K.W. Chau & Chuyuan Ren (2025), "City-Size Tax, Henry George and Urban Scaling," Research Square preprint, posted 14 August 2025 (not peer-reviewed). researchsquare.com — fetch blocked (403) to this session 2026-08-30; summary reconstructed from a WebSearch listing of the paper's abstract — used for the "city-size adjusted mean social surplus indicator," the power-law urban-scaling framing, the explicit "Georgist tax" framing, and the stated policy motivations (B-claim; abstract-level, full methodology not read; preprint status flagged).