Resource Rents
The economic rent from natural resources — oil, minerals, spectrum, fisheries — which Georgist analysis treats like land rent: socially capturable without efficiency loss.
Definition
Resource rents are the economic rent earned from natural resources that, like land, are not produced by human effort — oil and gas, minerals, the radio spectrum, fisheries, water, and pollution sinks. Georgist analysis extends the logic of land rent to all of these: because the resource exists regardless of who owns it, capturing its rent for the public is efficient and just.
Capturing Resource Rent
Mechanisms include severance and royalty taxes, auctioned extraction rights, spectrum auctions, and resource dividends. As with land, a well-designed rent charge does not reduce the supply of the resource (it is fixed by nature), so it carries little deadweight loss.
The Resource Curse
Where resource rents are captured privately or by corrupt states, they can weaken governance — the "resource curse." Transparent public capture and distribution (as with the Alaska Permanent Fund) is the Georgist remedy.
See Also
Sources
- IMF (2012), "Issues in Extractive Resource Taxation." PDF