Low Government Revenue from the Mining Sector in Zambia and Tanzania: Fiscal Design, Technical Capacity or Political Will?

摘要

The contribution of mining to economic and social development in Sub-Saharan Africa isunder increased scrutiny and criticism. Minerals are non-renewable resources, andproduction represents a transformation from a subsoil to a financial asset. Unless the gainsare efficiently captured, saved and invested by the ultimate owner of the resource, thecountry in question could experience a net reduction in its national wealth.Preliminary empirical evidence indicates that effective benefit-sharing in mining has beennotoriously difficult to achieve. In this paper, we present a simple method to benchmark thedegree of revenue-sharing in some major mining countries. This is utilised to estimate theamount of mining revenue foregone due to ineffective mining revenue-sharing in our casecountries of Tanzania and Zambia during the period 1998-2011. Using company-level datafrom the recently published Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) reports in thetwo countries, we find that profit-based corporate tax made a very modest contribution tomining revenue, despite 5-10 years of operations under the current owners and a globalmineral super cycle since 2005/6 (TEITI 2011; TEITI 2012; ZEITI 2011; ZEITI 2012). Grossvalue-based corporate taxes, together with employee-based taxes, dominate the tax revenuecollected from the mining sector.The principal elements needed to secure improved revenue-sharing in mining are: i) robustfiscal design, including a progressive element to capture windfalls while encouraging costsavingand production; ii) specialised tax administration for extractive industries and mining,to minimise the erosion of the tax base and to establish and enforce correct taxassessments; and iii) political will and accountability, together with government consistency,in order to secure the expected tax collection from mineral extraction over time withincreased transparency of mining-related revenues.