Taxation change in Sub-saharan African gold mines

In this paper, we analyze empirically the effects of tax changes on firms' profits in extractive industries. We estimate the effect of the profit tax and royalty on the extracting firms' declared profit in African countries during the period spanning from 2007 to 2018. We use the Mining Intelligence database to constitute a panel of annual individual data from a database of 363 gold mines located in 21 Sub-Saharan African countries. We obtain an inverse relationship between the tax rate change of the two tax instruments and the profit of the firms. Our results illustrate the crucial role of cost overstatement. From a tax policy point of view, we underline the shortcomings of asymmetry of information for declared profit and consequently for government revenues.