Who'd want to be a landlord now ?

[Bjauck]

I'm quite sure you know the answer why. I've never been happy with the whole idea of dividend payments and with inputation credits because the more efficient method from a tax point of view is to keep the funds in retained earnings / shareholder's equity and let the share price reflect that. Therefore generation a tax free capital gain. Just allow the shareholder to elect any disbursements of payment by simply selling a portion of their share holding. This creates liquidity on the NZX (for which the reality being, the liquidity is drying up on the NZX)..

I think I may not have made my point clear in my response to another poster. Namely: Much of NZ business is now actually in foreign ownership. So, owning foreign shares may actually be a way to invest in those companies who own NZ businesses now.

However in relation to imputed dividends I disagree. It gives a tax-neutral flexibility for companies to either retain or distribute tax paid profit. Attaching imputation credits means that the shareholder is not then in effect double-taxed on the company profit. If the tax paid profit were kept in the company, then the only way for a shareholder (who relies on an income stream from investments) would be to sell shares thereby incurring transaction costs.

Other countries have investment schemes with discounted tax rates on dividends and/or a tax threshold before dividend income is taxed. Certainly until NZ introduces such schemes, imputation at least tries to address double taxation on the income from NZ shares.

A few years old:
https://www.interest.co.nz/business/...reholders-says