Natural resource endowments and the domestic revenue effort

We examine whether there is evidence of an offset between government revenues from hydrocarbon (oil and gas) related activities and revenues from other domestic sources in a panel of 30 hydrocarbon producing countries. Our main finding is that there is an offset of about 20%, which is robust to the inclusion of control variables, the exclusion of outliers, and alternate estimation methodologies. While the impact of the offset on long-term development prospects is not clear, there is a risk of significant adjustment costs in moving to a higher level of domestic taxation once natural resources are depleted. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.