The infrastructure crisis:
William Vickrey, 1996 Nobel prize winning economist, was a lifelong student of the economics of transport systems in London and New York.
He emphasised that landowners could share the cost of public services by paying for the capital infrastructure.
Vickrey said: “Equity and efficiency are both served by having landlords contribute to the network costs of the services. The increased efficiency of the local economy would tend to benefit the landlords by raising market rents by more than the amount of the subsidy.”
And, “If landlords in a community could be made aware of their long-term interests, they would voluntarily agree to tax themselves on a site value basis to subsidise utility rates so as to permit them to be set at close to the efficient level, and find that the rental value of their land had risen by more than the amount of tax subsidy.”
Who could say it better?
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