Governments around the world are wrestling with the problems of enormous debts, low growth, high unemployment and a gap between the demands of public expenditure and what can be raised through taxation. There are two small islands with no natural resources which have enjoyed high growth combined with low taxation: Hong Kong and Singapore. Nor do they have any public debts; in fact, on the contrary, they generally run a budget surplus, and investment income is a feature of their government revenue. Purves suggests that here lies a model for generating public revenue that could be adopted in other countries to allow a shift in taxation from production and consumption to the Economic Rent of land.
