What is Tax? Why Tax Matters?
Before we do something on tax, we should know what is tax? Why the tax matters? Actually, tax is a compulsory contribution to state revenue levied by the government. Our government usually uses taxes to build public facilities and infrastructures such as schools, hospitals, highway and airports, which provide convenience to all of us. Taxes usually can be divided into categories like income tax, sale tax, asset tax, and others.
Exploration of the potential factors of tax
We collect eight factors potentially related the spatially and temporally varied tax in Australia:
- Local population
- Road density/ road accessibility
- Number of near hospitals
- Income
- Expense for medical levy
- Expense for gifts or donations
- Low-income population
- High-income population
Various open data from Australia Government are utilized for the geovisulisation of these eight variables.
The relationships between tax and these socio-economic potential factors are explored from two aspects:
- Their respective relationships are explored with non-parametric models.
- Their geospatial local impacts are described using geographically weighted regression (GWR). Before GWR-based prediction, variables are selected using step-wise linear regression.
Varied geospatial local impacts of variables on tax
- Population plays more roles in the tax in the western and central Australian regions.
- Road density or road accessibility is important for all Australian regions except for east-southern region.
- The contributions of hospitals are similar with road.
- The contribution of income is more important in central regions than other regions.
Predicted distribution of tax in 2030 across Australia
The geospatial distribution of tax in 2030 is predicted using geographically weighted regression model. Results show that the tax will be significantly increased in western regions, and it also will be increased in eastern regions.
