The Center for the Study of Economics a 501(c) 3 not-for-profit educational research foundation established in 1980. We’re the inheritor of one of the oldest nonprofits that fought, wrote, and most importantly acted its convictions: the Henry George Foundation of America. HGFA rolled out in 1926.
CSE knows what it wants to do and knows who will benefit.
CSE’s goal is to provide efficient access to prosperity for all by eliminating/reducing distortionary exactions from human effort.
CSE identifies and quantifies sources of revenue when inefficient taxes on labor, investment, and production are reduced (or replaced), so facilitating desired growth (or balance) in places and economic systems.
CSE works to leverage the tax system to work as a tool to help utilize that part of the commons – schools, public works, parks, police and fire services, etc. – that is expensive to build and is often pocketed by private hands in the form of speculation and absentee ownership.
The purpose of CSE is to demonstrate that permanent change for an economically secure world starts simultaneously at the international level and the local level. We concentrate analysis on the micro-to–regional level; in concert with the reality that organization fora better lives needs local input and control of that essential ingredient to more prosperity for all: the land and its publicly created value.
From the postindustrial West, the burgeoning East, and the exploited South, the confounding difficulties communities face in securing an environment of shared prosperity and opportunity is trumped by the need to provide revenues to provide essential services such as infrastructure, superior education, public safety, and community assets. Traditional systems of tax are not fit for purpose.
Communities and stakeholders fall further behind as the linked issues of land and poverty are measured. Some conurbations need to tap their existing resources to improve the lives of citizens and commerce. Some communities need to preserve the unmonetized gifts of nature. Each population depends on the robustness of the other.
Using several examples of local to regional communities from selected parts of the world, we study the extent of civic land values. How is that value in effect privatized? Who benefits from the current state of affairs, and how this publicly sourced and owned value be dispersed and shared amongst communities?
There are many methods to accomplish this goal. CSE concentrated on one policy option that has been used with success and can be replicated and expanded anywhere in the world where there are issues of poverty, urban dysfunction and access to land and its capacity for wealth building; commonly identified as land value taxation (LVT).
With outreach, research and education, CSE clearly demonstrate that national and international norms of community revenue have both failed community stakeholders and have encouraged extractive rent-seeking behavior that further destroys local economies and the fabric of urban – and rural – society.
LVT is an alternative tax used in 20 cities, school districts and counties in the United States, most municipalities and states in Australia and New Zealand, and to varying degrees in other countries as well: Taiwan, Denmark, Estonia, and Namibia are amongst many. Singapore and Hong Kong are international paragons of success in collecting the economic rent of land to provide quality housing and transit construction and maintenance.
Traditionally, property taxes fall equally upon land values and building values. LVT shifts the bulk of property tax revenue from buildings (products of private capital and private labor) to the assessed or rental value of land (a public good created by public and community investment).