La fiscalité minière en Afrique : un état des lieux du secteur de l’or dans 14 pays de 1980 à 2015

The lack of information about the mining resource rent sharing between governments and investors is an easy statement in Africa. Existing public databases are often insufficient for a deep analysis of the African tax law applied to natural resource sectors, which limits the academic and operational work. The FERDI publishes the first tax and legal database which specifies the tax regime applied to industrial gold mining companies in 14 African countries from the 1980s to 2015. The database featuring 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 mining project; (ii) an entirely new level of historical depth; (iii) the link between each piece of tax information and its legal source. This database is used to make a first analysis of tax regimes and rent sharing in gold producer countries. The first results emphasize heterogeneity of tax regimes between English-speaking and French-speaking countries with a convergence of the average effective tax rates that increase in most countries following the tax reforms undertaken since 2010.