Mineral tax will live shorter. On top of that tax revenues for the government would be low, too. That leads to a Laffer curve-shaped function of tax revenue for the government, in which the “optimal level of taxation” is somewhere in the middle. Any mineral tax must be neutral. Neutral is defined as maintaining incentives for investors to exploit minerals. Therefore, the revenues must exceed the costs. Furthermore, the government must be able to rely on the amount of tax money it receives, therefore, the tax imposed must be as certain and as steady as possible. Often, governments decide to use a
The J Curve (book) The J Curve (book) The J Curve: A New Way to Understand Why Nations Rise and Fall (Simon & Schuster: 2006) is a book by political scientist Ian Bremmer. It was named a "Book of the Year" in 2006 by "The Economist". Bremmer's J Curve describes the relationship between a country's openness and its stability; focusing on the notion that while many countries are stable because they are open (the United States, France, Japan), others are stable because they are closed (North Korea, Cuba, Iraq under Saddam Hussein). According to Bremmer, a government's motivations differ dramatically depending on where they