Theoretical Perspectives on Resource Tax Design

The importance and complexity of petroleum and hard minerals operations is matched by the importance and complexity of finding effective ways to tax them. Many of these challenges arise in other activities too (exhaustibility of deposits being the main exception), but they take such extreme form in relation to resources as to have led to a proliferation of creative instruments and analytical methods. This paper reviews the challenges for tax policy in dealing with the resource sector, the principal instruments used, and some of the central design issues.