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Studies concerning Soviet taxation demonstrate a diversity of opinions on the nature of turnover taxes. Four major views on the subject have emerged: (1) turnover taxes are simply a sales (excise) tax on articles' of consumption sold to the Soviet consumer; (2) not all turnover taxes are a sales tax, some of them are a substitute for rent on production of certain industrial materials; (3) in addition to being a sales (excise) tax on consumer goods and rent on some industrial materials, there exists a third type of turnover tax which is levied on agricultural production of the peasantry; (4) turnover taxes are a portion of the surplus product produced in industry and agriculture.

This paper aims to better understand the conditions that can lead to high and low opportunity entrepreneurship in countries with oil rents. Additionally, the study aims to find out the differences between countries with oil rents and countries without oil rents.

A configurational analysis based on fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis was performed for a sample of 46 countries with oil rents and a sample of 20 countries without oil rents, using Country data from the World Bank World Development Indicators, World Bank Worldwide Governance Indicators, KOF Swiss Economic Institute, and Global Entrepreneurship Monitor.

The results show that control of corruption is important to achieve high levels of opportunity entrepreneurship in countries with oil rents and countries without oil rents alike. It is highlighted that the abundance of oil resources in a given country is not a curse, if some conditions are met. Multiple configurations that lead to high levels of opportunity entrepreneurship in countries with oil rents are presented. The study shows that none of the antecedent conditions is necessary per se, it is the combination of conditions that leads to the outcome of interest. The study indicates that either high control of corruption or low taxes should occur, no matter the combination of conditions, to achieve high levels of opportunity entrepreneurship.

The relation between control of corruption and entrepreneurship is complex and, in spite of the insights that were gathered herein, much is still to be explored. The coverage rate of the solutions shows that there are countries with high levels of opportunity entrepreneurship that do not fit in any of the obtained configurations. The sample size is also a limitation. Furthermore, to compute the set membership thresholds, the anchors were based on the percentiles, given the lack of theoretical basis to do so. Thus, other methods should also be used in the future, if possible with a larger data sample.

The obtained results have implications for policy makers, authorities and potential entrepreneurs. In countries that are oil producers, policy makers aiming to promote opportunity entrepreneurship should take into account that it is the combination of conditions that is important, and not each condition by itself. They should consider that several solutions are possible. Authorities aiming to promote anti-corruption reforms, can leverage the findings of this study to demand for more resources to institute practices and structures to better control corruption, and should articulate among themselves the actions to carry on to improve the level of opportunity entrepreneurship in their country. Potential entrepreneurs can use the findings of this study to ask for anticorruption reforms and tax reforms, and they should use their entrepreneurial talent to try to speed up the change.

By overlapping streams of research in entrepreneurship, institutions and oil curse, this study makes several contributions to the entrepreneurship literature. Different from extant literature, the study uses a configurational approach and identifies the combinations of conditions that lead to high and low opportunity entrepreneurship in countries with oil rents. The non-linearity of the configurations is highlighted. Furthermore, for the first time, the study includes a panel without oil rents in the analysis, which enabled a comparison with the other set of countries and provides new insights about the importance of control of corruption to achieve high levels of opportunity entrepreneurship.

While the relationship between natural resource rent and economic growth is well documented in the literature, not much robust analysis has been done to estimate the causative relationship between oil resource rent and economic growth in Ghana. This might be due to the fact that commercial production of crude oil started not long ago in Ghana. This paper aims to examine the causal relationship between oil resource rent and economic growth for the period of 2011 to 2020 in Ghana.

The study incorporates economic growth as a function of oil resource rent, non-oil revenue, foreign direct investment, capital and interest rate in a Cobb–Douglass production function/model. The study used four different estimation strategies including the autoregressive distributed lags model, Toda–Yamamoto test approach, nonlinear autoregressive distributed lags model and nonlinear Granger causality.

The main finding revealed that 1% increase in oil resource rent generates 0.84% increase in economic growth of Ghana in the long run. Contrary, the authors find an insignificant positive effect of oil resource rent on economic growth of Ghana in the short run for the period under study. The result from the Toda–Yamamoto test approach also showed a unidirectional causality running from oil resource rent to economic growth of Ghana, providing evidence in support of the resource blessing hypothesis in Ghana. The results are robust to two different alternative estimation strategies.

The causal relationship between crude oil resource rent and economic growth is examined.

With heterogeneous findings dominating the growth and natural resources relations, there is a need to explain the variances in Africa's growth process as induced by robust measures of factor endowments. This study used a comprehensive set of data from the updated database of the World Bank to capture the heterogeneous dimensions of natural resource endowments on growth with a particular focus on establishing complementary evidence on the resource curse hypothesis in energy and environmental economics literature in Africa. These comprehensive data on oil rent, coal rent and forest rent could provide new and insightful evidence on obscure relations on the subject matter.

This paper considers the panel vector error correction model (PVECM) procedure to explain changes in economic growth outcomes as induced by oil rent, coal rent and forest rent. The consideration of the PVECM was premised on the panel unit root process that returns series that were cointegrated at the first-order differentials.

The paper found positive relations between oil rent, coal rent and economic development in Africa. Forest rent, on the other hand, is inversely related to economic growth in Africa. Trade and human capital are positively related to economic growth in Africa, while population growth is negatively associated with economic growth in Africa.

Short-run policies should be tailored towards the stability of fiscal expenditure such that the objective of fiscal policy, which is to maintain the condition of full employment and economic stability and stabilise the rate of growth, can be optimised and sustained. By this, the resource curse will be averted and productive capacity will increase, leading to sustainable growth and development in Africa, where conditions for growth and development remain inadequately met.

The originality of this paper can be viewed from the strength of its arguments and methods adopted to address the questions raised in this paper. This study further illuminated age-long obscure relations in the literature of natural resource endowment and economic growth by taking a disaggregated approach to the component-by-component analysis of natural resources factors (the oil rent, coal rent and forest rent) and their corresponding influence on economic growth in Africa. This pattern remains underexplored mainly in previous literature on the subject. Many African countries are blessed with an abundance of these different natural resources in varying proportions. The misuse and mismanagement of these resources along various dimensions have been the core of the inclination towards the resource curse hypothesis in Africa. Knowing how growth conditions respond to changes in the depth of forest resources, oil resources and coal resources could be useful pointers in Africa's overall energy use and management. This study contributed to the literature on natural resource-induced growth dynamics by offering a generalisable conclusion as to why natural resource-abundance economies are prone to poor economic performance. This study further asks if mineral deposits are a source or reflection of ill growth and underdevelopment in African countries.

Despite the huge financial resources associated with oil, Nigeria has consistently recorded poor growth performance. Therefore, this study aims to examine how corruption and oil rent influence Nigeria’s economic performance during the 1996–2021 period.

Various estimation techniques were used. These include the bootstrap autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds-testing, dynamic ordinary least squares (DOLS), the fully modified OLS (FMOLS) and the canonical cointegration regression (CCR) estimators and the Toda–Yamamoto causality.

The bounds testing results provide evidence of a cointegrating relationship between the variables. In addition, the results of the ARDL, DOLS, CCR and FMOLS estimators demonstrate that oil rent and corruption have a significant positive impact on growth. Further, the results indicate that human capital and financial development enhance economic growth, whereas domestic investment and unemployment rates slow down long-term growth. Additionally, the causality test results illustrate the presence of a one-way causality from oil rent to economic growth and a bi-directional causal relationship between corruption and economic growth.

Existing studies focused on the effects of either oil rent or corruption on growth in Nigeria. Little attention has been paid to the exploration of how the rent from oil and the pervasiveness of corruption contribute to the performance of the Nigerian economy. Based on the outcome of this study, strategies and policies geared towards reducing oil dependence and the pervasiveness of corruption, enhancing human capital and financial development and reducing unemployment are recommended.

The paper aims to assess the institutional readiness of Ghana prior to and after the production of her first oil. The paper also assesses the influence of politics in directing the appropriate use of the oil rents in facilitating the developmental needs of the country.

The paper uses a literature review of the main theories regarding national politics and institutional policies in explaining the economic demise of a country due to a natural resource find. It also uses the natural resource find in Norway as a case study, drawing lessons from the effectiveness of Norway’s institutional policies in harnessing maximum benefits from their oil find and how developing nations such as Ghana can do same.

The paper establishes that Ghana’s institutional architecture as regards the production of oil and gas is fraught with inadequacies on all fronts as regards regulations, regulators and the needed logistics. Additionally, the paper also highlights the role of Ghana’s political elite in perpetuating these institutional inadequacies.

The paper highlights the insufficiencies in the institutional readiness for Ghana’s oil find and brings to the fore the influence of Ghana’s politics in contributing to these inadequacies.

This study aims to analyze the effects of natural resource rents on income inequality.

This study uses a panel quantile regression (QR) approach for 42 Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries over the period 1998–2018.

The results show that natural resource rents have a negative and statistically significant effect on income inequality. Regarding the types of resources, the results show that coal rents increase inequality, while forestry and oil rents reduce income inequality. The results also show that the effects of mining and gas rents vary along the income inequality distribution. Finally, the results reveal a negative and significant effect of natural resource rents on income inequality in all sub-regions except Southern Africa.

The results suggest that the SSA Governments should intensify the implementation of income redistribution policies such as family allowances to poor families with multiple children and public sector job creation. SSA policymakers should also increase access to electricity, and internet, and allocate a portion of oil revenues to create an intergenerational sovereign wealth fund.

First, few studies have analyzed the effects of various types of natural resource rents on income inequality. To this end, this study used the QR method to examine the impact of natural resource rents on inequality, by laying emphasis on various types of natural resources. This study takes into account the likely heterogeneity across countries that may exist when considering a sample such as SSA countries, by examining the effects in the different sub-regions that make up this part of Africa (Central Africa, West Africa, Southern Africa and East Africa).

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the resource rents–quality-adjusted human capital nexus and the impact of quality of institutions.

For a large data set of 161 countries for the period 1996–2018 (yearly and 4-year periods), fixed effect estimation method is applied to investigate the impact of resource rents on quality-adjusted human capital and the role of quality of institutions on this relationship.

The paper found little evidence on the negative, significant and direct impact of total resource rents on quality-adjusted human capital. However, the results show that the negative effect of resource rents can be mediated by the quality of institutions. This result is robust to a long list of controls, different specifications and estimation techniques, as well as several robustness checks. Therefore, institutional quality seems to play a critical role in determining the indirect impact of natural resources on human capital. Moreover, the obtained results demonstrate that this resource adverse effect depends on the type of resource rents; in particular, high dependency on oil rents in developing countries appears to harm human capital.

The paper shows that it is not obvious that total resource rents decrease human capital and found that the coefficient is no longer significant in the two-way fixed effects model. However, the analysis has emphasized the crucial role of political institutions in this relationship and has shown that countries with higher quality of institutions make the most of their resource rents transiting to a better human capital environment. This result is found to be robust to a list of controls, different specifications and estimation techniques, as well as several robustness checks. In addition, we demonstrate that not all resources affect human capital in the same way and found that oil rents have a significant negative effect on human capital. This is an important distinction since several countries are blessing from oil rents. From this we conclude that the effect of natural resources on human capital varies across different types of commodities. On the other hand, the interaction between institutions and the sub-categories of resource rents shows that oil rents can increase human capital only in developing countries with higher quality of institutions (above the threshold). This result is also still hold while using alternative measures of political institutions.

The results in this paper have important policy implications. In particular, results highlight important heterogeneities in the role resource rents to the economy. As international commodity prices have shown high volatility in recent years, it is important for policy makers to understand the rents. Rents which are the difference between the price of a commodity and the average cost of producing it can have different effects in the economy, including the human capital. It is shown that in countries with low-quality institutions, natural resource rents negatively affect institutional quality, leading to conflicts, corruption and fostering rent-seeking activities. Overall, this reinforces the elite at the power that, obviously, is interested in preserving the status quo. In other words, there is a vicious circle between resource rents and low-quality institutions that impedes institutional change. How to regulate this in the best possible way requires a good understanding of how resource rents are generated and appropriated for different sectors, their different effects and how people react to these rents. The evidence suggests the policy toward better political institutions may help countries to improve social outcomes such as health and education which offer high social returns.

The paper is part of the author's PhD research and is an original contribution.

A tax based on land value is in many ways ideal, but many economists dismiss it by assuming it could not raise enough revenue. Standard sources of data omit much of the potential tax base, and undervalue what they do measure. The purpose of this paper is to present more comprehensive and accurate measures of land rents and values, and several modes of raising revenues from them besides the conventional property tax.

The paper identifies 16 elements of land's taxable capacity that received authorities either trivialize or omit. These 16 elements come in four groups.

In Group A, Elements 1‐4 correct for the downward bias in standard sources. In Group B, Elements 5‐10 broaden the concepts of land and rent beyond the conventional narrow perception, while Elements 11‐12 estimate rents to be gained by abating other kinds of taxes. In Group C, Elements 13‐14 explain how using the land tax, since it has no excess burden, uncaps feasible tax rates. In Group D, Elements 15‐16 define some moot possibilities that may warrant further exploration.

This paper shows how previous estimates of rent and land values have been narrowly limited to a fraction of the whole, thus giving a false impression that the tax capacity is low. The paper adds 14 elements to the traditional narrow “single tax” base, plus two moot elements advanced for future consideration. Any one of these 16 elements indicates a much higher land tax base than economists commonly recognize today. Taken together they are overwhelming, and cast an entirely new light on this subject.

A widely held belief before the 1990s – referred to as the oil-blessing hypothesis – was that oil discovery and production should promote economic growth and development and lead to poverty reduction. However, the so-called ‘oil-curse’ hypothesis, postulated by Sachs and Warner in 1995, challenged this belief, thus provoking a heated debate on the theme. The oil-curse hypothesis has been traditionally tested by means of cross-sectional and panel-data models. The author goes beyond these traditional methods to test whether the presence of spatial effects can alter the hypothesis in oil-producing African countries. In particular, this paper aims to investigate the effects on economic growth of oil production, oil resources and oil revenues along with the quality of democratic institutions, investment and openness to trade.

A Durbin spatial model, a cross-sectional model and panel-data model are used.

First, the validity of the spatial Durbin model is vindicated. Second, consistently with the oil-curse hypothesis, oil production, resources, rent and revenues have a negative and generally significant effect on economic growth. This result is robust for across the panel data, spatial Durbin and spatial autoregressive models and for different measures of spatial proximity between countries. Third, the author finds that the extent to which the business environment is perceived as benign for investment has a positive and marginally effect on economic growth. Additionally, economic growth of a country is further stimulated by a spatial proximity of a neighbouring country if the neighbouring country has created strong institutions protecting investments. Fourth, openness to international trade has a positive and marginally significant effect on economic growth.

This paper examines theories and studies that have been done before. However, as the related literature on the growth–resource abundance nexus has rarely examined spatial effects, this study seeks to test jointly the spatial effect and the neighbouring effect on the oil curse hypothesis.