Digitalisation of property taxation in developing countries: Recent advances and remaining challenges

Many of the hurdles that governments face in improving their property tax systems are common across different countries and contexts. Key challenges include: incomplete and outdated property tax rolls; limited staff and resources to carry out updates; ambiguity in land rights; imprecise addressing systems; and thin property markets, making it difficult to leverage information from transactions and contracts.

Digitalisation has the potential to address some of these barriers as satellite imagery tools and geolocalised data systems can help to detect, register, characterise and value properties.

This report reviews over 15 property tax digitalisation projects in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia. It takes stock of the main features of these projects and their results, and provides an overview of the lessons learnt and the main challenges.