households with no female adults.<sup>9</sup> This method of classifying households is useful because women living in a household with no male adults are likely to face different challenges than female household heads whose adult sons live with them. This is particularly relevant in Ethiopia, where gender norms limit women’s role in agriculture and the presence of an adult son has implications for access to land (Bezu and Holden 2014b; Kosec et al. 2018).

- We disaggregate the individual-level analysis by sex of the respondent. This is valuable because it reveals the landownership status of women in male-headed households, who are otherwise hidden in the household-level analysis.

Using these household typologies by gender and definitions of land ownership, in the second part of the analysis in sections 4.3 and 4.4, we discuss the prevalence, tax payments, and incidence of land taxation and its implications for Ethiopia. The central question in assessing vertical and horizontal equity is how to rank households and individuals by their ability to pay—a proxy measure for the “same” circumstances. Household expenditures should be adjusted by some measure of the household size, such as per capita or adult equivalence scales, because poverty could be underestimated if poorer households are larger than wealthier households (Deaton and Zaidi 2002; Lustig 2018). However, the per capita approach has been criticized for assuming the consumption needs of adults and children are the same, which overestimates the incidence of poverty when there are many young children in large households (Lustig 2018; World Bank 2018). We therefore order households by spatially-adjusted adult equivalent consumption into four quartiles to take into account household size and the demographic composition of household members.<sup>10</sup> Households are ranked according to their positions in the expenditure distribution of all rural and urban households and individuals by their positions in the expenditure distribution of all individuals. As a welfare measure, we use annual household expenditure consumption, which is the sum of the annual value of food consumption and expenditures on nonfood items,<sup>11</sup> education, meals out, and utilities.<sup>12</sup> Property taxes assessed on the value of land and buildings could affect the property investment decisions of owners (Bird and Slack 2005).<sup>13</sup> However, the land tax in Ethiopia is area-based, not value-based. The Ethiopian policy contexts—a tax on land area, fixed supply of land, no land market, and immobile landholders—are consistent with the assumptions that predict that the tax burden falls entirely on landholders, who cannot relocate because of the risk of losing their land rights. Further, in low-income countries, property taxes are not expected to affect property owner decisions to move to a lower tax jurisdiction because they do not receive adequate local public services (Bird and Slack 2005; Brockmeyer et al. 2021; Kalkuhl et al. 2018). They are also

> 9 The Instructional Guide on the Abbreviated Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (A-WEAI) (Malapit et al., 2015) uses this classification.

> 10 Tax incidence studies typically group households into five quintiles rather than four quartiles. Because grouping femaleheaded landowning households into consumption quintiles results in a small sample size, we classify them into quartiles.

11 Nonfood items include personal care products, clothing, tobacco, transport, household fuel, costs for domestic and household services, spending on housing, and contributions to informal social security and community development.

12 Expenditures are considered to be a better welfare measure than income for measuring living standards because farmers’ incomes fluctuate between seasons and over years, and there are practical difficulties in measuring rural incomes (Deaton and Zaidi 2002; Martinez-Vasquez 2004).

13 Much of the literature on the theory of property tax incidence focuses on urban property taxes with a tax on the value of land (Brueckner 1986; Feldstein 1977); an untaxed agricultural sector (Muthitachareon and Zodrow 2012); or an assumption of landowners as absentee landlords (Pasha 1990). There are three broad views on the incidence of property tax. In the _traditional view_ , property tax has two components, namely land and capital or structures (Fullerton and Metcalf 2002; Simon 1943). Incidence of a land tax falls entirely on landowners because there is a fixed supply of land, and a tax on capital improvements is shifted to tenants because capital owners can avoid the economic burden by moving capital to other jurisdictions (England 2016; Zodrow 2001). The _new view_ uses a general equilibrium framework with mobile capital, which responds to property tax rates in different cities (Mieszkowski 1972; Zodrow 2001). Property tax is relatively more progressive because capital owners bear the property tax burden, but the progressivity could be reduced by shifting the burden to housing consumers and landowners (Fullerton and Metcalf 2002; Zodrow 2001). The _benefit view_ regards property tax as a user fee that perfectly mobile residents pay to receive their desired levels of local public services; this is consistent with the benefit principle of taxation (Norregaard 2013; Zodrow 2001).

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