Alaska Permanent Fund

Time for a California Oil Severance Tax

California’s new Democratic supermajority will be sorely tempted to raise taxes and fees across the board, which I have earlier suggested is a bad idea politically. But that hardly means that it should reject new revenues altogether, and the easiest place to start would be an oil severance tax. The oil severance tax works exactly …

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How Did Alaska Avoid the Resource Curse? Can Anyone Else Do So?

Dan made a useful point the other day about the possibility that increased energy production could yield a resource curse, i.e. an increase in unproductive and oligarchical rent-seeking when an economy becomes based upon resource extraction. One might add that this rent-seeking also tends to underdevelop a country’s human capital, as it has in Saudi …

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