On capturing oil rents with a national excise tax

Abstract

In static competitive analysis the entire burden of an excise tax on a good in fixed supply falls on the supplier. Imposing a tax does not change the price paid by consumers and the price received by suppliers falls by the amount of the tax. One is tempted to conjecture that this result extends to the case of costlessly extracted depletable resources. Where there are many consuming nations, there is unlikely to be perfect collusion among national governments in taxing away the rents of supplier. It therefore is of interest to examine the implications of non-cooperative behavior among consuming nations. Our strategy is first to analyze tax incidence and optimal taxation in a static model and then to extend the results to the intertemporal case by establishing an isomorphism between the multiperiod and the one period models.

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