Mining taxation in Africa: the gold mining industry in 14 countries from 1980 to 2015

The lack of information about the sharing of mining resource rent between governments and investors is an easy statement to make for Africa. The existing datasets are often insufficient for a deep analysis of African tax law as applied to the natural resource sectors, which has limited the academic and operational approaches. This paper describes the first legal and tax database which specifies the tax regime applied to industrial gold mining companies in 14 African gold-producing countries from 1980 to 2015. The database has three major innovations: (i) an inventory of taxes and duties (rate, base and exemptions) payable during the prospecting phase and mining phase of a gold project; (ii) a new detailed historical record covering 1980 to 2015; (iii) the link between each piece of tax information and its legal source. This database is used to make a first analysis of mining tax regimes and rent sharing in the main gold-producing countries. The first results highlight the heterogeneity of tax regimes between English-speaking and French-speaking countries. There has been a convergence of the average effective tax rates across most of the countries, the effective tax rate has increased in most countries following the tax reforms undertaken since 2010.The database is downloadable following the link : http://www.ferdi.fr/en/indicator/minining-tax-database-africa.Keywords: Mining sector, Gold, Taxation of natural resources, DatabaseJEL: Q38, K34, C80