Capturing Economic Rents From Resources Through Royalties and Taxes

Oil price fluctuations, concerns over the division of resource revenues, and unconventional oil and gas developments are forcing governments to confront the same issue: how to design optimal royalty and corporate tax systems that bring in a publicly acceptable share of revenues without discouraging private investment. This paper surveys tax and royalty systems across six countries, as well as four US states and five Canadian provinces, offering concise analyses of their strengths and shortcomings to describe the best and simplest approaches to both. As in a public-private partnership, government owns the resources and allows private agents to maximize the rents resources generate. An optimal royalty system will thus be rent-based, ensuring that both owner and agent obtain maximally competitive returns so that each has incentives to continue the partnership. Such a system will also be simple, making compliance easy, manipulation difficult, and risks affordable. And it will be stable, instilling in the private sector the confidence needed to invest for the long term. As for corporate income taxes, they should be neutral across business activities, and applied at equal effective rates on economic income, to avoid distorting market forces through subsidies or needless complexity. A clean rent-based tax that allows all costs incurred by producers to be expensed or carried over, along with a corporate income tax system shorn of many of the preferences that negatively affect business activity, should be the way forward for any government looking to update their fiscal regimes for the 21st century

The Shaman and the Spirits: The Meaning of the Word 'ling' in the Jiuge Poems

In all major dictionaries the first entry for the Chinese word 'ling' is 'shaman' (wu). This meaning of the word is based on Wang Yi's interpretation of two Jiuge poems in the Chuci collection. The present article investigates the possibility of this identification and concludes that there is no evidence to support Wang Yi's opinion. On the other hand, there is ample evidence to suggest that the accepted meanings of ling (spirit, numinous, magical) and the general characteristics of the Chinese shaman are indeed interrelated in many respects

Universities for Knowledge Economies:Hong Kong and the Chinese Mainland within Globalization and Decentralization

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