Policies and Tax Systems for Regulating Vacant Houses

An increased number of vacant houses have been found in Spain and Japan in recent years, specifically in de-growth areas. This article explores the extent to which these two countries have promoted policies and tax systems to counteract this phenomenon. According to existing research, tax systems sometimes work as factors that encourage the increase of vacant houses. However, the systems in the two countries in question are dissimilar. We apply the divergence perspective for developing housing system typologies, and analyse vacant housing policy measures from the administrative perspective of Japan’s centralised unitary and Spain’s decentralised unitary state.