Best of the financial columnists
Revive an old idea: tax the land
Free Exchange
The Economist
Land was central to the ideas of 18th- and 19th-century political economists, says The Economist. They believed the distribution of rents from land ownership could explain the “yawning gaps between rich and poor and all sorts of other economic ills”. A more recent strand of research shows they had a point. Real estate is the largest asset class in the world. In 2020 it made up around 68% of the world’s non-financial assets. Land accounted for just over
