Last month’s tax revenue on capital gains from rising land values dropped to the lowest in five months after the central bank adopted targeted measures to curb soaring property prices in the Taipei area in late June, the Ministry of Finance said yesterday.
The ministry’s statistics showed that revenue from land value increment taxes declined 16.13 percent to NT$5.2 billion (US$163 million) from NT$6.2 billion in June, although last month’s number represented 8.2 percent growth from a year earlier.
“We still need to observe for a few more months to see whether the decline was due to the selective credit controls adopted by the central bank to curb property speculators,” Lin Lee-jen (林麗貞), head of the ministry’s statistics department, told a media briefing.
The number of land transactions in Taipei City dropped by 1,706 deals last month, posting the largest decrease among all cities and counties, followed by Taipei County, which saw a decline of 1,066 transactions, Lin said.
The ministry said the real estate market was still bullish compared with the same period last year, since in the first seven months of the year revenue from land value increment taxes increased NT$15.6 billion, or 57.3 percent, from a year ago.
Meanwhile, revenue from personal income taxes also dropped NT$27.8 billion, or 13.3 percent year-on-year, from January to last month, which represented the third-largest decline in history, ministry statistics showed.
Saying that revenues from personal income taxes reflected last year’s economic recession, Lin blamed the drop on various tax reduction measures that the government implemented to help the nation weather the financial crisis.
Revenue from business income taxes declined NT$17.3 billion, or 8.3 percent from a year earlier, in the first seven months of the year, after the NT$17.7 billion that was delayed from entering account books in the same period last year was taken into consideration, Lin said.
Nevertheless, revenue from business taxes increased NT$34.4 billion, or 24.2 percent year-on-year, between January and last month because of reviving domestic consumption and improving imports on the back of the economic recovery, the ministry said.
Last month, overall tax revenues increased NT$8.2 billion, or 12.6 percent year-on-year, to NT$73.6.4 billion, with revenue from business taxes posting the largest growth at NT$8.7 billion, or 20 percent from a year earlier.
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