A complete picture of public finances requires statistics that go beyond taxation, especially for many African countries that obtain substantial revenues in the form of grants or royalties from oil and minerals. Revenue Statistics in Africa collects statistics on both tax and non-tax revenues, non-tax revenues being government revenues that do not meet the OECD definition of taxation.1 Although there are some important methodological differences between tax and non-tax revenues, they need to be included in any accounting of a country’s total financial resources.2 This chapter provides cross-country comparisons of non-tax revenues for the countries in this publication.3

The main categories of non-tax revenues reported here are:4

• grants from foreign governments or international organisations (budget aid, food aid, capital transfers, current transfers, project grants, programme grants, international debt relief, etc.);

• rents and royalties (such as oil or mining royalties);

• other property income (interest, dividends and other returns on government investment);

• sales of goods and services (which include some administrative fees);

• fines and penalties (including fines and penalties due to tax violations);

• miscellaneous and unidentified revenues (non-tax revenues that cannot be classified according to the other categories).

Non-tax revenues in Africa in 2022 amounted to 6.2% of GDP on average among the 35 countries reporting this data for this edition of Revenue Statistics in Africa.5 On average, the amount of non-tax revenues collected in each country was 52% of the amount of tax revenues. Non-tax revenues ranged from 0.7% of GDP in South Africa to 23.7% of GDP in the Republic of the Congo. Botswana, Lesotho, Equatorial Guinea, the Republic of the Congo and Somalia were the only countries for which non-tax revenues were higher than tax revenues in 2022 (Figure 2.1).

Botswana, Lesotho, Eswatini and Namibia are net recipients of funds from the Southern African Customs Union (SACU) Common Revenue Pool (see Box 2.1), which leads to non-tax revenues being higher and tax revenues being lower than otherwise would be the case. Equatorial Guinea and the Republic of the Congo, meanwhile, collect twice as much extractive-related revenues as a percentage of GDP than any other country in the report. Somalia has relied mostly on grants to fund its government expenditures, as it has built its fiscal capacity since the end of a civil war in 2012 and has faced many economic challenges (Khan and Khan, 2022[1]). As a result, its non-tax revenues were twice as high as its tax revenues at 5.2% of GDP (mostly grants) in 2022.

Non-tax revenues in 2022 were 0.4 percentage points (p.p.) higher as a share of GDP than in 2021 (Figure 2.2). This increase was driven by an increase of 0.4 p.p. in revenues from rents and royalties and from other property income, though it was partially offset by a decline in “other revenues” (mostly SACU revenues in Botswana, Lesotho, Eswatini and Namibia). Combined with the increase of 0.5 p.p. in tax revenues, this equated to a 0.8 p.p. increase in public revenues (tax and non-tax) on average across the 35 countries in 2022.

The uptick in non-tax revenues for the Africa average between 2021 and 2022 followed five years in which non-tax revenues remained around 5.8% of GDP. Before that, the average ratio of non-tax revenues to GDP declined from a high of 7.3% of GDP in 2013 to a low of 5.1% in 2016.

Over the period 2013-22, non-tax revenues declined by 1.1 p.p., mostly due to declines of 0.5 p.p. in grant revenues and of 0.8 p.p. in other non-tax revenues (mostly SACU revenues). This decrease in non-tax revenues offset the increase in tax revenues over this period: the average sum of tax and non-tax revenues over this period declined by 0.1 p.p., despite African countries’ progress in tax revenue mobilisation.

Figure 2.3 shows the contribution of each major sub-category of non-tax revenues to total non-tax revenues for each country in 2022. In this figure, “other NTR” can include sales of goods and services, fines and penalties, or miscellaneous and unidentified revenues, but mostly consists of SACU revenues. In Panel A, revenues are shown as a percentage of GDP while in Panel B, they are shown as a percentage of total non-tax revenues. Four distinct groups are apparent in the data:

• Nine countries received a majority of their non-tax revenues in the form of grants. On average, these countries received grant revenue equivalent to 3.5% of GDP in 2022.

• Eight countries received most of their non-tax revenues from rents and royalties. For all these countries aside from Zambia and South Africa, the two countries with the lowest non-tax revenues as a percentage of GDP, oil and gas royalties provided the majority of non-tax revenues. On average, rents and royalties for these countries were equivalent to 5.4% of GDP.

• Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho and Namibia, the four countries neighbouring South Africa that belong to SACU, received substantial non-tax revenues via transfers from the SACU Common Revenue Pool. On average, these countries collected non-tax revenues outside of grants and rents and royalties equivalent to 11.4% of GDP.

• For the remaining 14 countries, neither grants nor rents and royalties constituted a majority of non-tax revenues. Grants were the largest source of non-tax revenues for Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal and the Democratic Republic of the Congo but were less than 50% of total non-tax revenues. Similarly, rents and royalties were the largest source of non-tax revenues for Guinea and Tunisia but were less than half of non-tax revenues. For the other countries, the main sources of non-tax revenues included: interest and dividends for Botswana, Equatorial Guinea, Mali, and Seychelles; other property income aside from rents, royalties, interest and dividends for Mauritius; fees for goods and services for Cabo Verde, Egypt, Ghana, and Morocco; and miscellaneous and unallocated revenues for Kenya.

The post-COVID period has been characterised by major disruptions in price levels in Africa. These price changes had different impacts on different tax and revenue bases. As Figure 2.4 shows, for African countries reporting non-tax revenues in this publication, double-digit increases in both average non-tax revenues and average GDP occurred in 2022. Nominal non-tax revenues increased by 27.4% between 2021 and 2022 on average but much of this increase was driven by accelerating inflation rather than real growth in non-tax revenues. Consumer price inflation increased between 2021 and 2022, from 5.6% to 9.2%, while the GDP deflator, a measure of the degree to which price changes drive increases in nominal GDP, also rose, from 7.1% in 2021 to 8.3% in 2022.

The base for tax revenues is generally contained within the national economy, which means that in the absence of changes in tax policy or administration, and in the case of a broad‑based system of taxation, changes in nominal tax revenues would generally be correlated with changes in nominal GDP. In the case of non‑tax revenues as a percentage of GDP, however, the numerator and the denominator may be affected by different sets of prices. Resource revenues, for example, are affected by a combination of internationally determined commodity prices and exchange rates, as will be explained in the section on revenues from the extractive sector at the end of this chapter.

Grants, meanwhile, are determined by foreign economies and will therefore be sensitive to both exchange rates and inflation in the receiver country. The amount of local currency for a given amount of grants denominated in USD will change from year to year, while at the same time, the purchasing power of the local currency will also change.

Between 2019 and 2020, the increase in the average exchange rate (+4.8%) offset the average rate of inflation in African countries (+4.9%). Grants denominated in USD therefore had roughly the same value in local economies in 2020 as they did in 2019. Between 2021 and 2022, on the other hand, USD exchange rates declined on average for African countries, which meant that the value of grants denominated in USD was eroded both by inflation and by declining USD exchange rates. The sensitivity of grants to exchange rate fluctuations highlights the vulnerability of some African economies to external financial support and underscores the need for enhanced domestic revenue mobilisation in those countries.

This section analyses changes in non-tax revenues between 2021 and 2022 by category. Certain countries saw unusually large changes in non-tax revenues in 2022 (Figure 2.5): five countries recorded the largest increase in non-tax revenues as a share of GDP in the last ten years, while five countries recorded the largest decrease in the same indicator. Non-tax revenues increased as a share of GDP by 8.7 p.p. and 13.3 p.p. in the Republic of the Congo and Equatorial Guinea, respectively, due to increases in oil and gas revenues that drove up rents and royalties and interest and dividends. The largest decrease occurred in Lesotho, which saw a drop of 9.3 p.p. due to a fall in revenue from the SACU Common Revenue Pool.

Between 2021 and 2022, grant revenues as a percentage of GDP were unchanged on average across the 35 countries. However, changes in grant revenues were the largest driver of change in non-tax revenues for 14 countries, although increases in some countries offset decreases in others. Grants increased in seven of these countries and declined in the other seven. The same was also true of non-tax revenues aside from grants or rents and royalties. The average change in other non-tax revenues as a percentage of GDP was zero, but it was still the largest driver of change in non-tax revenues for 15 countries; seven countries observed increases in this indicator and eight saw decreases.

Some countries in Revenue Statistics in Africa receive substantial grant revenues while for others grants are negligible. On average, grant revenues for the 35 African countries in this publication amounted to 1.3% of GDP in 2022. Sixteen countries received grant revenues amounting to less than 0.5% of GDP in 2022, the same number as in 2021 (Figure 2.6). Most countries receiving grants amounting to less than 0.5% of GDP in 2022 are middle-income according to the World Bank’s classification based on gross national income (GNI) per capita (World Bank, 2024[5]), with the exceptions of Guinea and Mali, which are low-income countries. Most of the countries receiving grants equivalent to more than 1% of GDP in 2022 were low income, with the exception of Lesotho (lower middle-income) and the Seychelles (high income).

Figure 2.7 presents grants as a percentage of GDP received by countries and their GNI per capita. The empty upper right-hand quadrant indicates that higher-income African countries receive proportionately lower grant revenues. However, many countries occupy the bottom left quadrant, indicating that they receive relatively low levels of grant income despite having lower incomes. For example, while Guinea, Lesotho and Zambia all had GNI per capita around 1 200 US dollars in 2022, Lesotho’s grants as a percentage of GDP were 2.9%, over six times higher than the level in Guinea and Zambia.

Grant revenues reported by national authorities do not necessarily represent the full breadth of foreign aid received by countries. Countries may receive aid in the form of concessional loans or in a way that is not directed towards the central government (e.g., support to non-governmental organisations, scholarships, in-donor refugee costs). Loans are not considered revenue and are therefore not included among the tax and non-tax revenues reported here.

This difference can be illustrated by looking at statistics on foreign aid to African countries as reported by donor countries. Figure 2.8 shows that Official Development Assistance (ODA) payments made to African countries greatly exceed the amount paid directly to African governments, due to concessional loans or grants that are not directly received by African governments. Although the countries receiving the most net ODA tend to receive the most grant revenues, the relationship is not linear. Sierra Leone and Malawi both receive net ODA between 11% and 13% of GDP, while the level of grants as a percentage of GDP in Sierra Leone was five times higher than that of Malawi.

Grant revenues and foreign aid are overlapping concepts. It may be difficult however to align aid statistics as reported by donor countries with the grant revenues reported by recipient countries due to data, methodological and conceptual issues.

• Grant revenues have some overlap with ODA, as defined by the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC).6 Grants covered by this publication focus on revenues received by countries from foreign governments and international organisations. ODA is a measure of donor countries’ efforts to support development in low- and middle-income countries. ODA not only covers flows captured under “grants” in this publication (budget aid, food aid, capital transfers, current transfers, project grants, programme grants, international debt relief, etc.), but also encompasses concessional loans, in-kind technical assistance, in-donor administrative costs and in-donor refugee costs, as well as other activities that do not generate a (net) revenue flow to the country. The volume of ODA provided by a donor to a given country will thus be different from – and often higher than – the volume of grants reported by that country in Revenue Statistics.

• Statistics collected by the DAC on ODA flows to African countries include public flows from all members of the DAC and some countries outside the DAC, as well as multilateral organisations such as the World Bank, the IMF and the UN. Statistics on development co-operation provided by some large non-OECD economies, such as Brazil, the People’s Republic of China, India and Indonesia, are not included (OECD, 2023[8]).

Countries relying on grant revenues often face sudden drops in grants from one year to the next. Eight countries in this publication reported a single-year drop in grant revenues of at least 2% of GDP in at least one year between 2012 and 2022.

Property income, or the revenues countries obtain through their status as owner of property, amounted to 3.2% of GDP for African countries on average in 2022 (Figure 2.9). This was an increase of 0.8 p.p. from 2021. Three-quarters of this increase, or 0.6 p.p., can be attributed to two countries: Equatorial Guinea, which saw an increase of 13.5 p.p., and the Republic of the Congo, which saw an increase of 8.6 p.p. In 2022, Equatorial Guinea began collecting gas monetisation revenues (Lupachik, 2023[10]). This revenue, classified as interest and dividends, amounted to 567 billion CFA francs (USD 909 million) or 7.7% of GDP in 2022, which was close to the total tax revenue Equatorial Guinea collected that year.

Rents and royalties are revenues generated from property the government owns, usually by prospecting and extracting non-renewable resources from government land or from harvesting government-owned farms and forests. Interest and dividends are returns on government-owned investments in corporations. Most property income for African countries came in the form of rents and royalties in 2022, which were on average 59% of all property income among the 33 countries reporting. For countries collecting property income equivalent to at least 1% of GDP, this was 64%.

Most property income in African countries comes from resource extraction. Eighty percent of the total rents and royalties collected by African countries, expressed in US dollars, came from rents on extractive industries, and 38% of interest and dividends came from government stakes in corporations involved in resource extraction. These revenues will be discussed in more detail in the section on revenues from extractive industries.

Rents and royalties from sources other than resource extraction in 2022 included water royalties in Lesotho, which amounted to 3.6% of GDP, royalties from the Suez Canal in Egypt (USD 348 million, or 0.07% of GDP) and telecom licences in Guinea, Mauritania and Somalia. Most interest and dividends come from various kinds of corporations, including public and private companies or public monopolies, or they are unspecified investment income collected by other institutions, such as the interest and dividends collected by social security funds in the Seychelles. Central bank investment income is also reported here, such as the revenue collected by the Bank of Botswana and central bank profits in Tunisia.

Certain countries generate substantial non-tax revenues from the normal operations of government. These can be divided into sales of goods and services, fines and penalties, and miscellaneous and unidentified non-tax revenues. The challenges in compiling non-tax revenues in general are often encountered with these kinds of revenues, since they are typically not collected by tax administrations and are often not defined by legislation. They might not even be captured by government budgets. This can therefore lead to underestimates of revenues for institutions and governments that have less taxing authority and are therefore more reliant on non-tax revenues, such as, for example, municipal governments.

For all these categories of revenues, there can be arguments about the degree to which they are unrequited or compulsory, and therefore whether they are more properly classified as taxes. The question of which administrative fees are taxes and which are not is discussed in Annexes A and B. Fines and penalties on tax violations are sometimes reported as part of tax revenues, which could lead to an under-reporting of total revenues for fines and penalties. Finally, miscellaneous and unidentified revenues are by definition revenues for which little information is available that can be used in order to determine whether or not these constitute taxes or non-tax revenues.

Governments produce goods and services both as a market- and as a non-market participant. As a market participant, governments sometimes provide goods and services that can also be obtained from private companies (such as food or transportation). At the same time, they also provide services in the course of administering programmes and executing laws that are unique to the function of government. Fees charged for these non-market services are generally classified as administrative fees.

Administrative fees are often difficult to classify since they occupy a grey area between payments for services (which are non-tax revenues) and compulsory unrequited payments collected during government operations (which are taxes).7 Court fees and fees for driver’s licences, passports, patent registrations and marriage certificates tend to be classified as non-tax revenues. When administrative fees are classified as taxes, they are typically assigned to one of the following categories:

• 4400 Taxes on financial and capital transactions (for example, taxes on sales of land);

• 5200 Taxes on use of goods and performing activities (for example hunting licences, vehicle registrations);

• 6000 Other taxes (for example, sales of fiscal stamps, where stamps are used to pay for taxes and administrative fees).

Seven countries generated non-tax revenues from sales of goods and services and administrative fees equivalent to at least 1% of GDP in 2022 (Figure 2.10): Egypt (2.3% of GDP), Cabo Verde (2.2%), the Seychelles (1.8%), Mozambique (1.4%), Ghana (1.3%), Morocco (1.1%) and Sierra Leone (1.1%).

The composition of revenues from sales of goods and services and administrative fees varied by country. In Cabo Verde, 97% of revenues listed under sales of goods and services were fees. In Ghana, most of these revenues were sub-national revenues reported as either “Municipalities, Departments and Agencies”, or “Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies”. In Morocco, 48% of revenue from government sales of goods and services were collected at the local level.

Some notable categories of non-tax revenue do not fit within any of the categories listed above, including:

• capital transfers not included elsewhere;

• voluntary donations to government agencies from individuals or private corporations (not including donations from international organisations, which are classified as grants);

• private payments to government made as a result of major court settlements or insurance claims (such as the EUR 100 million payment Arcelor Mittal agreed to pay to the government of Senegal after a court case following the cancelation of an iron mine (RFI, 2014[11]));

• payments covering different categories in the classification where a breakdown is not available;

• payments whose proper classification is unknown due to a lack of data. Rwanda did not disaggregate non-tax revenue outside of grants, so these were included in this category;

• SACU revenues to Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho and Namibia (see Box 2.1).

Miscellaneous and unidentified revenues can be a significant component of non-tax revenues in certain countries. These include exceptional voluntary contributions to the government in Tunisia, capital transfers from special statutory funds in Mauritius and, in Morocco, payments made to government in exchange for the right to compete with state institutions in the provision of services.

The volatility of miscellaneous and unidentified revenues may be due to large capital transfers, revenue streams that are short-lived or funds that are reclassified as unidentified due to lack of information. The higher values for this category could reflect uncertainty as to the true amount of revenue within other non-tax revenue classifications.

All five members of SACU collect customs and excise taxes under a unified tax regime and then transfer those funds to the SACU Common Revenue Pool. The SACU Common Revenue Pool in turn redistributes the tax moneys collected according to a revenue-sharing formula. South Africa possesses the main ports of entry into Southern Africa and ends up collecting almost all the customs duties and excises allocated to the SACU Common Revenue Pool. South Africa therefore makes net payments into the SACU Revenue Pool while the other SACU countries are net recipients.

SACU revenues to South Africa are negligible but they have a strong impact on the finances of the other members of the customs union (Figure 2.11). In 2022, these revenues amounted to 5.4%, 7.2%, 13.7% and 6.7% of GDP, respectively, in Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho and Namibia.

Besides exogenous economic shocks, member countries also see their SACU revenues rise and fall due to changes in the parameters used in the revenue-sharing formula. The economic shock of the global financial crisis rendered many economic forecasts of the time inaccurate; because SACU payments were calculated based on these forecasts, major adjustments to SACU payments were required in 2010 and 2011 to compensate for years of overpayments into the SACU pool (Mongardini et al., 2011[14]).

A similar situation occurred in 2014, when a slowdown in South Africa’s economy caused forecasts to be revised downward; Eswatini, Lesotho and Namibia’s SACU revenues declined as a percentage of GDP in 2015 and 2016, although this trend was reversed in 2017.

In 2020, customs and excise tax revenues collected in the SACU countries were lower than was forecast in the previous year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This meant that the SACU Common Revenue Pool made overpayments in 2020 that needed to be repaid the following year, making SACU revenues higher than the long-term trend in 2020 and lower than the long-term trend in 2021.

Revenue Statistics in Africa seeks to distinguish between national revenues coming from the extraction of natural resources, which are referred to in this report as extractive-related revenues, and other forms of revenue. Revenues from extractive industries, which include oil, gas, minerals, forestry and fishing, are highly dependent on commodity prices which are set globally, and highly volatile, exposing government budgets to risks that are difficult to foresee. Additionally, assessments of tax and revenue policy should account for the fact that natural resource endowments, especially mineral resources, are independent of a country’s human resources and level of development, and resource revenues are generally not sensitive to economic and social policy.

The exploitation of non-renewable natural resources like oil, gas, and minerals represents a depletion of national wealth, and therefore brings up the issue of opportunity costs when it comes to under-selling, or under-monetising these resources by national governments. For these reasons, an analysis of resource-related revenues, and if possible, a distinction between renewable and non-renewable resource-related revenues, is important to the analysis of revenue policy in African countries.

The detailed country-specific revenue categories provided in Revenue Statistics in Africa permits an identification of many of the national revenues that can be attributed to extractive industries in certain countries, depending on the level of detail in the data submitted by participating countries. For example, Ghana’s “Income/profit tax on oil companies” can be identified as an extractive-related revenue (see Table 5.13. in Chapter 5), as can “Revenue from oil” reported under “rents and royalties” for Nigeria (Table 6.29. in Chapter 6). Using this methodology, for each category of revenue, the total amount of revenue that is explicitly reported as extractive-related can be estimated.

This methodology may undercount revenues from the extractive industry since the distinction between extractive and non-extractive revenues is not always made in Revenue Statistics in Africa data. For this reason, efforts to introduce this distinction in more revenue categories and for more countries are ongoing. For example, for the first time in this report, the revenue data for the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Niger and Sierra Leone distinguishes between revenues from oil and minerals and other forms of revenue (see Tables 5.6, 5.25 and 5.30 in Chapter 5, and Tables 6.9, 6.28 and 6.33 in Chapter 6).

Potentially compounding the risk of undercounting, this methodology does not factor in the indirect impacts of extractive industries on public revenues. In some countries, extractive industries such as petroleum and minerals have a significant impact on growth across the economy and could have a significant multiplier effect. This industry could therefore have an impact on all forms of tax and non-tax revenues, including, for example, VAT revenues that can be boosted by macro-economic spillovers from the mining sector, or higher corporate taxes on hotels that have seen increased business from mining corporations.

Figure 2.12 shows the reported extractive-related revenues identified using the methodology above for different revenue streams. Panel A shows for each type of revenue, the percentage of revenue collected by each African country reported as coming from extractive industries. Panel B shows for each revenue category, the total extractive-related revenues collected as a percentage of GDP. As explained in Box 2.2, African governments have different strategies for capturing natural resource wealth, and this is shown here in the number of different kinds of revenue that are reported as extractive-related.

Most of the revenues explicitly identified as extractive-related in the Revenue Statistics in Africa data are concentrated in a few revenue categories. The categories for which more than 10% of revenues come from extractive industries are corporate income taxes, recurrent property taxes, mining taxes (classified as other taxes on specific goods and services), export taxes, rents and royalties, and interest and dividends.

On average, 63% of rents and royalties were extractive-related, the only revenue category for which this was a majority. On average, extractive-related revenues for the 35 African countries amounted to 3.3% of GDP in 2022. Extractive-related revenues reported under corporate income tax, rents and royalties, and interest and dividends added up to 3.1% of GDP on average among African countries in 2022, which corresponds to 96% of the total extractive-related revenues. It is possible, however, that more extractive-related revenues in other revenue categories are less likely to be identified as such.

Most extractive-related tax revenues come from corporate taxes on oil companies. Extractive-related revenues were far more likely to be identified within income taxes than consumption taxes. It is more administratively straightforward to distinguish between extractive and non-extractive companies within corporate taxation since these taxes are collected at the level of corporations. Identifying extractive-related VAT or other consumption revenues requires linking each transaction to the entity making the purchase. However, some consumption taxes could be identified as extractive-related if they target the products of resource extraction. Some countries levy taxes on exports of extracted commodities, for example, to recapture some of the natural resource value at the point where it leaves the country. For example, South Africa and Guinea both tax diamond exports.

In Figure 2.13, tax and non-tax revenues that have been explicitly identified as being extractive-related within the Revenue Statistics in Africa datasets are shown for each country. The oil-rich countries of Equatorial Guinea and the Republic of the Congo stand out, with total extractive-related revenues as a percentage of GDP of 28.1% and 22.9%. No other African country had extractive-related revenues above 10% of GDP aside from Gabon, for which this figure was 10.2% of GDP. Thirteen countries – Cabo Verde, Eswatini, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Morocco, Rwanda, Senegal, Somalia, South Africa, Togo and Uganda – reported either no or negligible extractive-related revenues. On average, the 35 African countries reported extractive revenues amounting to 3.3% of GDP, with extractive-related tax revenues amounting to 0.9% of GDP and extractive-related non-tax revenues amounting to 2.4% of GDP.

Figure 2.14 shows the same extractive-related revenues broken down by the associated resources. Oil and gas are shown to have the largest impact on public revenues, accounting for almost the entirety of the revenues for four of the top five countries in terms of extractive revenues, the exception being Botswana, which collects mineral revenues amounting to 8.9% of GDP, one quarter of which is in the form of royalties, and three quarters in the form of dividends from mining companies. Only Mozambique and Equatorial Guinea explicitly reported gas revenues.

Equatorial Guinea’s oil and gas revenues in 2022 came in the form of petroleum royalties (34%), corporate taxes (18%), oil dividends (11%), shareholder participation in oil revenues (7%) and personal income tax (2%). Extractive revenues for the Republic of the Congo come mostly from revenues from the Société nationale des pétroles du Congo (SNPC, a national oil company). SNPC is a part-shareholder in all private oil and gas ventures in the country, as well as having full ownership of some oil projects (EY/CNC, 2022[18]). The revenues associated with the SNPC are classified as rents and royalties in this publication, but actually constitute a mix of different revenue streams and occupy the conceptual boundaries between resource rents and investment income.

For many African countries, the bulk of non-tax revenues come from extractive-related revenues (Figure 2.15). For nine African countries, they constitute the majority of non-tax revenues, and for three African countries, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and the Republic of the Congo, they represent over 95%.

Extractive-related non-tax revenues take the form of rents and royalties, or interest and dividends, with all other forms of non-tax revenues generally negligible, aside from some fines and penalties on mining companies reported in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and some fishing fines in Mauritania. For all but three African countries, the main form of extractive-related revenues was rents and royalties, with Equatorial Guinea, Botswana, Ghana collecting more extractive-related revenues in the form of interest and dividends.

Rents and royalties in 2022 were the main form of resource-related revenues for 16 African countries and accounted for 49% of the USD 48 billion collected in extractive-related revenues among all the African countries reporting, followed by total taxes, at 41% and other non-tax revenues such as interest and dividends at 9%.

Figure 2.16 shows extractive revenues identified among tax revenues. Nineteen countries reported some revenues, of which 16 of these reported more than 1% of their tax revenues as coming from companies involved in extraction.

Economies across the African continent are strongly affected by global commodity markets. However African governments collect extractive-related revenues, these tend to be a highly volatile source of finance. Six countries (the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Lesotho, Mauritania and Nigeria) collected rents and royalties equivalent to 5% of GDP or more in at least one of the last ten years and they all registered at least one year-on-year increase in rents and royalties of over 35% and one year-on-year decrease of over 27% as a percentage of GDP.

Raw commodities are a major component of the exports of most of the countries included within this publication. These include:

• aluminium (over 25% of exports in Guinea):

• cobalt (over 20% of exports in the Democratic Republic of the Congo)

• copper (over 25% of exports in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, The Republic of the Congo and Zambia)

• diamonds (over 25% of exports in Botswana and Lesotho)

• gold (over 25% of exports in Burkina Faso, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Rwanda, Somalia, Togo and Uganda)

• iron (over 25% of exports in Mauritania and Sierra Leone)

• natural gas (over 25% of exports in Equatorial Guinea)

• oil (over 25% of exports in Cameroon, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Ghana, Equatorial Guinea and Nigeria)

• fish (over 25% of exports in Cabo Verde and the Seychelles).

The COVID-19 pandemic introduced both supply and demand shocks, which impacted the prices of basic commodities (Figure 2.17). Despite double-digit drops in natural gas, petroleum and phosphate prices in 2020, these commodities bounced back in 2021 and 2022: in 2022, the price of petroleum was 50% higher than it was in 2019, while coal, phosphate and potassium chloride were triple their price in 2019. The price of natural gas in the United States and Europe was, respectively, two and half times and seven and a half times higher than in 2019.

The largest changes in the value of commodity exports from Revenue Statistics in Africa have tended to coincide with price shocks (Figure 2.18). This underlines the vulnerability of African economies to global oil and gas price shifts and underscores the critical need for economic diversification to mitigate the risks associated with heavy reliance on oil revenues (Usman and Landry, 2021[20]) and (World Bank, 2023[21]).

While African countries are gradually amplifying their mineral exports, generating significant revenues from these remains a challenge (World Bank, 2023[22]). This situation emphasises the imperative for African countries to fortify their strategies for tapping into the revenue potential of diverse mineral resources.

[23] CEPII (2023), BACI International Trade Database at the Product-Level, http://www.cepii.fr/CEPII/en/bdd_modele/bdd_modele_item.asp?id=37 (accessed on 1 February 2023).

[18] EY/CNC (2022), Société Nationale des Pétroles du Congo - Rapports des Commissaires aux comptes sur les états financiers annuels et Spécial sur les conventions réglementées, Exercie clos le 31 décembre 2022, https://www.finances.gouv.cg/sites/default/files/documents/SNPC_2022_RGRS%20SOCIAUX.pdf.

[6] Group, W. (ed.) (2024), The World Bank Atlas method - detailed methodology, https://datahelpdesk.worldbank.org/knowledgebase/articles/378832-what-is-the-world-bank-atlas-method (accessed on  2024).

[3] IMF (2024), World Economic Outlook, April 2024 Edition (database), https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/weo-database/2024/April.

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[1] Khan, O. and S. Khan (2022), Customs reforms help Somalia increase tax revenue despite COVID-19 and fragility, https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/governance/customs-reforms-help-somalia-increase-tax-revenue-despite-covid-19-and-fragility.

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