Publication: Gender Implications of Rural Land Use Fee and Agricultural Income Tax in Ethiopia
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2021-06
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2021-06
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Land use fees and agricultural income tax in Ethiopia are levied on rural landholders according to the size of agricultural landholdings. Summarizing the evidence presented in the authors paper based on new, nationally-representative data on taxation of households and individual landholdings and rights in the Fourth Ethiopian Socioeconomic Survey, this brief discusses how area-based land taxes are regressive and the tax burdens for female-only households are larger than for dual-adult households. Social norms limiting women’s roles in agriculture and a gender agricultural productivity gap are likely to be a source of this gender bias. Lower tax rates for smallholders can reduce women’s tax burdens, but area-based land taxation would continue to be regressive.
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“Komatsu, Hitomi; Ambel, Alemayehu A.; Koolwal, Gayatri; Yonis, Manex Bule. 2021. Gender Implications of Rural Land Use Fee and Agricultural Income Tax in Ethiopia. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/36029 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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Reducing the tax rates for smallholders can diminish the gender difference in tax burdens, but the tax continues to be regressive. This highlights the difficulty of area-based land taxes to be vertically equitable.Publication Gender norms, landholdership, and rural land use fee and agricultural income tax in Ethiopia(Elsevier, 2022-10-01)Area-based land taxes, a form of property tax, exist where rural land markets do not exist or do not function well. Understanding how these taxes affect different groups of landholders, including by men and women, is important since a tax based on the land size is likely to have an outsized effect on smaller landholders. However, survey data allowing for an individual- and household-disaggregated analysis has been scarce. 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