Abstract

Our study addresses the issue of tax design and rent sharing for the main copper producing countries in Africa and Latin America. We use an original database to construct our mining tax policy indicator, and combine it with four other databases to study its determinants. We pay particular attention to forms of governance, the broader political context, and government party affiliations, to explain mining tax policies. Our main results indicate that democratic regimes are more likely to capture a larger share of the rent compared to autocratic ones. Beyond regime type, the institutional setting itself plays a critical role in shaping rent distribution, as does transparency. Evidence further suggests that left-wing governments capture a larger share of the rent compared to right-wing ones. Finally, these findings contribute to the social anthropology literature on “travelling models”, which are designed by international experts on the basis of supposedly universal mechanisms.