The Non-fiscal Development of Catalonia’s own Non-environmental Taxes: Taxes on Empty Homes, Packaged Sugary Drinks and Non-productive Assets of Legal Persons

Abstract

The taxes created by the Spanish autonomous communities are highly unequal and even non-existent in some cases, despite implying the exercise of their most relevant and complete tax authority. However, due to the limits of this power and the political costs of exercising it, a common feature of these regional taxes is their non-fiscal nature, focusing especially on the environmental field (since neither the State nor local entities had imposed taxes in this regard). Nevertheless, Catalonia has opened a new path for the proliferation of these regional taxes with taxes on empty homes, packaged sugary drinks and non-productive assets of legal persons, which are of special interest after the taxes on the environment implemented by the State (with the corresponding loss of validity of the matching regional taxes). Consequently, after analysing the general configuration of the aforementioned Catalan non-environmental taxes, their positive and negative aspects will be delimited as a way of addressing the potential growth of regional taxes, although the due exercise of this autonomous tax power requires a reformulation of the general financing system.

Keywords

• own taxes
• catalonia
• empty homes tax
• packaged sugary drinks tax
• non productive assets tax