Property tax in Prague : quantifying the current situation and potential changes on the basis of data from tax returns
Abstract
The relatively low property tax in the Czech Republic is determined partly by the respective law and partly by coefficients set by municipalities. Only some municipalities take advantage of their power to change these coefficients; this is partly due to insufficient information about the possibilities and their impacts.
The objective of this article is to quantify the impacts of the current situation as well as of selected changes and thus provide a basis for public discussion about the design and rate of property tax in the Czech Republic. In the empirical part, based on detailed anonymised data from tax returns, we focus on the capital city Prague.
Prague provides an interesting case to study because of its diversity of property, its size and the extent of its possibilities for altering its property tax. We contribute to the so far limited empirical research on property tax in the Czech Republic by quantifying the impact of property tax on various groups of tax payers, the time development of property tax revenues for municipalities, and the impact of changes in the design of property tax.