An Analysis of the Distributional Impact of Imputed Rent Taxation

This paper argues that any housing policy which attempts to redistribute expenditure on housing by working within the confines of the public sector must be extremely limited and is unlikely to be effective. It examines both the potential for and distributional implications of providing additional resources for expenditure on housing in Australia by going beyond the existing framework of government expenditure and withdrawing the implicit subsidies which accrue to owner-occupiers through the non-taxation of their imputed income. It is shown that the distributional implications of taxing imputed income from owner-occupied housing depend on the interaction of house value, equity and income over the life-cycle of the owner-occupier and that a failure to take all of these factors into account could result in a policy of imputed income taxation having unintended distributional effects within the owner-occupied sector. However, since the survey data analysed shows that the subsidy to owner-occupiers which resulted from not taxing this income outweighted explicit public authority expenditure on housing at the time of the survey by a margin of more than 500%, it is argued that the revenue gained from the introduction of such a policy would be more than adequate to offset these effects and to ensure that housing resources were redistributed in an equitable manner.