African Mining Tax Database

Ferdi provides access to a database of tax laws and tax regimes that apply to industrial gold mines in more than 20 African countries. <br /> In partnership with the Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches sur le Développement International (CERDI), the International Centre for Tax and Development (ICTD), the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon (ENS Lyon) and the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs (MEAE), Ferdi provides access to [an important database] (https://fiscalite-miniere.ferdi.fr/), which lists over a long period of time the main tax laws and details the main taxes borne by mining companies. This database has been available to the public since September 2016 and has its own website since October 2018. Updated annually, it now covers 22 French-, English- and Portuguese-speaking countries, and improves the transparency of tax information in the extractive sector. More than 1300 legal texts were needed to build the base, which presents three major innovations: (i) a country-by-country identification of the taxes, duties and charges (rates, bases, exemptions) due during the research phase and during the exploitation phase of a gold mining project; (ii) an unprecedented historical depth that can go back as far as the 1980s; (iii) the association of each tax information with its legal source. The tools proposed make it possible to: 1) to understand the particularities of mining taxation in comparison with the general system, 2) to know the evolution of mining taxation, 3) to compare mining taxation between African countries, 4) to compare mining taxation between projects in the same country, 5) to assess the sharing of mining rent between the State and investors.