Mapping the literature on housing taxation in the UK and other OECD countries

Tax-advantaging housing leads to the under-accumulation of productive capital, impacts on housing markets and public finance, and poses questions of resource misallocation, progressivity and inequality. What lessons, relevant to the UK context, could be learn from international experiences? This paper maps two strands of literature related to housing taxation: comparative analyses of the UK and other OECD countries (the 'international sample') and analyses of a range of taxes in the UK (the 'UK sample'). Searches were performed in six academic databases, Google Scholar and six relevant institutional websites. About 400 references published since 1980 were examined by title, keywords and abstract and reduced to the two most relevant reference sets of 63 references in the international sample and 71 references in the UK sample. This paper noted a spread of references across 54 journals, with a high majority of references being published after 2000. The literature focuses on a wide range of taxes applying to different housing tenures, with the conspicuous absence of privately rented housing. The majority of references address issues of tax reform and distribution within the UK and US being over-represented compared to other OECD countries