An Evenly Distributed Base on an Unevenly Distributed Market: Revenue Geography Under a Surcharge

Abstract

An organization operating across many territories holds two distributions that need not coincide: the distribution of its physical customer base and the distribution of the revenue that base generates. This article examines a case where the two diverge sharply and shows what the divergence reveals. Across the 35 jurisdictions of Central Java Province, Indonesia, the registered vehicle fleet of 22,285,789 units is distributed with a Gini coefficient of 0.2497, while the local tax revenue those jurisdictions collect is distributed with a Gini of 0.4361. Revenue per registered vehicle on the annual vehicle tax varies by a factor of 5.62 between the highest and lowest jurisdictions, with cities collecting 330,500 rupiah per vehicle against 157,200 in regencies. On the transfer duty, levied on the same fleet by the same authority, per-vehicle yield varies by a factor of only 2.22 and the city–regency ratio is 1.15; the two per-vehicle series are essentially uncorrelated. The article argues that unit yield rather than unit count is the operative variable in revenue geography, that the two instruments extract from a common physical base in unrelated spatial patterns because they are triggered by different behaviours, and that a reassignment allocating revenue by unit location will equalize or concentrate depending on which of the two distributions it tracks. It proposes that organizations reporting market coverage should report yield dispersion alongside it.