Economic Sanctions and Taxation of Natural Resource Rent: Evidence from Spatial Analysis (Amedanou, Laporte, Ouédraogo & Rouamba, 2026)

Summary

"Economic sanctions and taxation of natural resource rent: Evidence from spatial analysis," by Isaac Amedanou, Bertrand Laporte, Mahamady Ouédraogo, and Bakary Johnson Rouamba (CERDI, Université Clermont Auvergne), appeared in The World Economy, 2026. It examines a question distinct from the wiki's existing resource rents coverage: how economic sanctions on a country change that country's own tax policy toward its natural-resource sector.

Method and Findings

The authors distinguish two measures of the average effective tax rate (AETR) on resource rents: a de jure rate (the formal, statutory rate) and a de facto rate (what is actually collected). Using a Spatial Durbin Model — which explicitly accounts for spillovers in both taxation and sanctions across neighboring countries — on a sample of 20 African countries (for the de jure measure) and a global panel of 75 developing and developed countries (for the de facto measure), 2000–2020, they document three main results, quoted from the paper's abstract: first, "both resource taxation (de jure and de facto) and economic sanctions exhibit significant spatial dependence across neighbouring countries"; second, "economic sanctions affect de jure rent capture, while their impact on de facto AETR is limited and operates mainly through indirect and spillover channels rather than through a direct strengthening of effective tax enforcement"; third, effects vary by sanction type and origin, with "financial sanctions exerting stronger effects than trade sanctions, and UN and US sanctions proving more influential than EU sanctions." The authors conclude that "sanctioned countries adjust formal tax policy in response to sanctions, which contribute to limit the adverse effect of sanctions on their de facto taxation of the resource rent" — i.e., governments raise the statutory rate on paper partly to offset sanctions' fiscal squeeze, even though actual collection doesn't move nearly as much. The results are reported robust to alternative sanction-intensity measures, alternative estimation strategies addressing endogeneity, and dynamic treatment effects.

Relation to the Georgist Case

This adds an international-political-economy dimension to the wiki's resource-rent-capture literature that its existing case studies (Colombia, Bolivia, Australia) don't cover: state tax policy toward resource rent is not set in isolation, but responds to both external geopolitical pressure and the tax choices of neighboring states. The de jure/de facto gap the paper documents — governments changing statutory rates without a matching change in actual collection — is a useful complement to the wiki's existing assessment- and enforcement-quality caveats on resource-rent capture generally: formal tax-rate changes are not by themselves evidence that a state is successfully capturing more rent.

Nuances and Limits

• Abstract-level source (B-claim). The paper's full text remained blocked to this session (both the Wiley publisher page and the authors' own CERDI/HAL preprint deposit, the latter behind a bot-detection wall); this page is built from the verbatim abstract, obtained from two independent author-archived preprint records, not the paper's regression tables or magnitude estimates. No specific elasticity or percentage-point figures for the tax-rate response were independently confirmed.
• Correlational, sanctions-focused design. The paper studies how sanctions affect resource-tax policy choices, not the efficiency or distributional properties of resource rent taxation itself.

Bears On

• Concept: Resource Rents — adds a sanctions/geopolitics dimension to the wiki's existing case-study cluster.
• Research: Martinez: Colombia's Resource Rents — a different Latin American resource-rent-capture case study, useful comparison of state capacity and political economy.
• Research: Tarras-Wahlberg & Uggla: A Golden Limit to Neo-Extractivism in Bolivia — a domestic-political-economy limit on resource-rent capture, complementing this paper's external-pressure (sanctions) angle.

See Also

• Resource Rents
• Martinez: Colombia's Resource Rents
• Tarras-Wahlberg & Uggla: A Golden Limit to Neo-Extractivism in Bolivia

Sources

1. Isaac Amedanou, Bertrand Laporte, Mahamady Ouédraogo & Bakary Johnson Rouamba (2026), "Economic sanctions and taxation of natural resource rent: Evidence from spatial analysis," The World Economy, published online 14 June 2026, DOI 10.1111/twec.70118. doi.org — fetch blocked (403) to this session 2026-08-29; verbatim abstract obtained from two independent author-self-archived HAL/CERDI preprint deposits (hal-05658061 and the companion short-form hal-05678269), matching the published paper's title and content exactly — used for the Spatial Durbin Model, the de jure/de facto distinction, the 20-African/75-global country panels, the spatial-dependence finding, the sanctions-affect-de-jure-more-than-de-facto finding, and the financial-vs-trade and UN/US-vs-EU sanction-type comparisons, all quoted directly above (B-claim; abstract-level, full regression tables and magnitude estimates not obtained — HAL's own full-text pages were blocked by bot-detection during this session).