Call for Papers: Taxation, Accumulation, and the State
Organizers: Kelly Kay (UCLA) and Renee Tapp (Clark University)
Sponsored by the Economic Geography Specialty Group and Political Geography Specialty Group
The global surge of populist politics has ushered in calls from both the right and left for radical transformation of the existent tax codes (Kumar 2017, Morgan 2017, Travis and Inman 2017). As the single most important tool the state has at its disposal to restrict or enable accumulation, changes to taxation policies and practices mean nothing less than the reimagining the state itself (Cameron 2008), particularly with regard to its relationship to capital. In the US and the UK, the last major tax shake-ups were the comprehensive reforms that occurred under Reagan and Thatcher respectively. Today, those overhauls have devolved into a tax climate characterized by (i) loopholes and the normalization of tax evasion (Wainwright 2011), (ii) proprietary accounting practices that have institutionalized distinct accumulation and governance strategies (McNeill 2017), and (iii) tax benefits for real estate investment that have opened up all forms and geographies of property and land to financialization (Kay 2017, Gunnoe 2014, Weber 2010, Gotham 2006, Coakley 1994). Although financialized strategies of capital accumulation have been extensively researched by geographers, few studies have articulated a comprehensive understanding of the tax regimes that underlie these processes in the 21st century.
This session aims to bring together scholars working on a broad range of topics related to taxation in order to better understand the centrality that tax policies and the tax code play in capitalist strategies, regulation, and state-building. In addition to examining the evolution of tax regimes, evaluating taxation today means understanding the possibilities and limitations of current and future tax schemes in achieving democracy and justice (Braithwaite 2002). Our goal is to establish a shared understanding of the contours of contemporary taxation and to delineate what is at stake in future tax reform.
We invite papers that make empirical engagements or theoretical interventions in that are concerned in a broad range of ways with the intersections of taxation and geography. Themes include but are not limited to:
• The impacts of particular tax legislation or regulation, including those that span the “urban/rural divide”
• Historical geographies of taxation
• Legal geographies or fiscal geographies and the production of space
• Urban fiscal geographies and finance
• The role of the tax code or tax norms in (re)producing racial, gendered, or class-based forms of discrimination
• Alternative tax structures and/or the political dimensions of tax redistribution
• The role of tax professionals, including by not limited to accountants, appraisers, and consultants in governance and knowledge transfer
Please send 250 word abstracts to kkay@geog.ucla.edu and ctap
References:
Braithwaite, V., ed. 2002. Taxing Democracy. Farnham, UK: Ashgate.
Cameron, A. 2008. Crisis? What Crisis? Displacing the Spatial Imaginary of the Fiscal State. Geoforum 39(3): 1145-1154.
Chassany, AS., and M. Stothard. 2017. French PM Says Tax Cuts for Wealthy May Come in 2018. Financial Times 10 July https://www.ft.com/
Coakley, J. 1994. The Integration of Property and Financial Markets. Environment and Planning A 26: 697-713.
Gotham, K. 2006. The Secondary Circuit of Capital Revisited: Globalization and the U.S. Real Estate Sector. American Journal of Sociology 112(1): 231-275.
Gunnoe, A. 2014. The Political Economy of Institutional Land Ownership: Neorentier Society and the Financialization of Land. Rural Sociology 79: 478-504.
Kay, K. 2017. Rural Rentierism and the Financial Enclosure of Maine’s Open Lands Tradition. Annals of the American Association of Geographers: http://dx.doi.
Kumar, M. 2017. Modi Set to Launch India’s Biggest Tax Reform Amid Protests. Reuters. http://www.reuters.
McNeill, D. 2017. Global Cities and Urban Theory. London: Sage Publications.
Morgan. 2017. US House Speaker Vows to Complete Tax Reform in 2017. Reuters. http://www.reuters.com/articl
Travis, A., and P. Inman. 2017. Labour Manifesto 2017: the Key Points, Pledges and Analysis. The Guardian 1 June.
Wainwright, T. 2011. Tax Doesn’t Have to Be Taxing: London’s ‘Onshore’ Finance Industry and the Fiscal Spaces of a Global Crisis. Environment and Planning A 43(6): 1287-1304.
Weber, R. 2010. Selling City Future: the Financialization of Urban Redevelopment Policy. Economic Geography 86(3): 251-274.