Taxing a Natural Resource with a Minimum Revenue Requirement

Abstract

The State may tax the extraction of a public natural resource in different ways. I consider the relative performances of a fixed fee, an ad valorem tax and a rent tax when the State must receive a minimal revenue for exploitation to take place. Taxing the resource may lower the probability that a firm will extract the resource. I show that the performance of each tax depends on the expected value of the resource: when it is high, the rent tax brings more revenue to the State; when it is low, the fixed fee is efficient while the rent tax does poorly. For an intermediate value, the ad valorem tax may bring the highest expected revenues among the three although it is always dominated by an hybrid tax that combines the latter two.