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Stamp Tax Australia

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Is stamp duty an effective taxation measure in modern Australia.

Abstract: In Australia, Stamp duty have been a substantial revenue generator for the state governments, accounts for around one-fourth of their taxation revenue (Deloitte, 2015). Lately, it has also been a most talked about topic in between investors & first home buyers. Researchers have reflected that even though these taxes are added on top of the sales price suppositively making a difficult purchase for buyers on papers, sellers are the real loser. Based on four case studies conducted in developed nations, this article shows the negative effects of so-called transaction cost and the economic inefficiency of it. It also elaborates how a Tax reform, replacing Stamp Duty with …show more content…

In the country, stamp duty average is approximately 3% of the value of the property. About 13-year period of the dataset was taken into consideration which was received from Australian Property Monitor and later cleaned up with the help of Real Estate Institute (Davidoff & Leigh, 2013).

Since Australian Property Monitor has only provided a proportion of the entire data because of government restrictions, the research analysis is based on Post Code-Level Means rather than individual sales. (All house sales, of all states, covered that were registered by the end of 2006) (Davidoff & Leigh, 2013).

Considering the mean of the log house prices in a postcode as the key price variable, with another crucial measure of the housing market; the log of the number of sales in a postcode in the given year. Correlating the suburbs data by the distance between their centroid with the help of FindMap Pty Ltd. was done (Davidoff & Leigh, 2013).

The analysis reflected that the number of houses sold per postcode goes down by approximately 3%, by increasing

10% stamp duty. This number does not vary at the border …show more content…

Also, around 40 characteristics of each house for example family room, construction type, parking space etc. was noticed. (Dachis, Duranton & Turner, 2011).

With the help of the econometric model, which is a hybrid of a regression discontinuity design, the researchers exploit a natural experiment to estimate the effect of Land Transfer Tax. Consistent with a mindset in considering a stamp duty as a tax on moving, the result of the research suggests that this land transfer tax negatively influence the volume of real estate transaction in Toronto by 14% approximately (Dachis, Duranton & Turner, 2011).

Another crucial reflected fact was that even though the tax was introduced on the buyers, it is almost fully capitalized into land prices.

Furthermore, the loss of 14% volume of real estate transaction causes a substantial welfare loss. This welfare loss, the cost of forgone mobility, is quite significant, about $1 for every $8 in tax revenue raised. In other terms, it is around $19 million every year in this case (Dachis, Duranton & Turner,

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