Targeting rents: Global taxes on natural resources

Abstract

In the debate on global justice, proposals to tax natural resources in order to reduce global poverty and fund other worthwhile objectives have attracted scholarly attention and controversy. In this article, I argue that this debate can be advanced by more clearly focusing on natural resource rents rather than resources themselves or the undifferentiated stream of benefits they generate. I argue that taxes on natural resource rents cannot be reasonably rejected by either side in this debate, and that the arguments typically used to resist distributive claims to natural resources either have no relevance when it comes to rents, or actually support such taxes.