Are sub-Saharan African Countries Losing it on Oil and Gas Revenue Management too? Evidence from Ghana

The judicious management of revenues from natural resources has been challenging. This paper examines the effectiveness of Revenue Management Laws for oil and gas revenues in Ghana. This is to assess whether Ghana has learnt any lessons from the challenges of mineral revenues management. The study found that the management of the minerals and mining sector revenues is disturbing and some imminent problems identified in the management of the recent oil and gas revenues. The study recommends the adoption of Drysdale's five principles of effective natural resource revenue management to avoid such problems associated with an influx of natural resource wealth. We recommend a consolidation of Petroleum Revenue Management Act, 2011 (Act 815) and the Petroleum Revenue Management (Amendment) Act, 2015 (Act 893) to provide consistency in interpreting the oil and gas Revenue Management Laws. We posit that with the experiences in the minerals and mining sector emphasized and the implementation of our recommendations, Ghana would be better informed on how to establish an effective and efficient framework to manage oil and gas revenues to spur Ghana Beyond Aid. Keywords: Ghana; mining; oil and gas; petroleum revenues; management; natural resources; mineral royalties; resource curse; minerals JEL Classifications: H2, Q2, Q3 DOI: https://doi.org/10.32479/ijeep.728

Tax efforts and tax evasion–economic development Nexus. Does institutional quality matter?

As a result of the failure to meet tax collection targets, policymakers, economists, and financiers have focused their attention in recent years on how a country's tax effort has been employed to combat tax evasion and maximise tax collections for economic growth. The study looked at the nexus between tax efforts, tax evasion, and economic development, as well as the effect of institutional quality on moderating the nexus in Ghana. The maximum likelihood (ML) estimation and structural equation modelling (SEM) techniques were used in the study to analyse a sample of quartered data from 1996 to 2020. Testing the hypotheses reveals that both tax efforts and tax evasion have negative effects on the economic freedom of the world index (EFWI) but positive effects on urbanisation. A test of the third hypothesis shows that institutional quality moderates tax evasion in Ghana in order to influence economic development. The findings imply that the idea that tax evasion is bad for an economy or that tax efforts drive domestic revenue mobilisation is based mainly on prima facie evidence. Tax efforts such as tax amnesty may appear to compliant taxpayers as an incentive for tax evaders, which could affect their compliance. The adoption of the tax efforts index measure to examine its econometric impact on economic development is one of the pioneering attempts in the field. The study recommends well-thought-out strategies to ensure that tax efforts achieve their intended goals