Failure of the Net Profit Share Leasing Experiment for Offshore Petroleum Resources.

A current trend among oil-producing nations with private oil sectors is to move toward tax systems that are based upon pr ofits rather than production. The authors present a case study of wha t can go wrong with profit-based tax schemes. They study the implemen tation of the net profit share leasing system in the United States in the early 1980s. They conclude that the information requirements of the scheme are heavy, perhaps prohibitive, and that the net profit sh are system can easily backfire if the informational requirements can not be met. The authors also show that the U.S. government misused th e limited amount of information that was available to it. Copyright 1988 by MIT Press.