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For different reasons the oil companies might apply higher required rates of return than they did some years ago, and this will have consequences for investments and tax revenue in oil provinces. By applying various required rates of return as well as various oil prices, this study derives future Norwegian tax revenue during 2018-2050 by using a partial equilibrium model for the global oil market. The model explicitly accounts for reserves, development and production. Both investment in new reserves and production are profit driven. With rising required rates of return less of the high cost reserves become profitable to develop and investments decline. Because the government in practice carries a large fraction of the investments, less investment in a period increases the tax base and the tax income. The initial effect is offset by a subsequent reduction in production which has a negative effect on future taxes. The result is that increasing required rates of return will lead to small variations in net present value of total tax revenue. With lower oil prices, tax take increases significantly when required rates of return rise.

Using a partial equilibrium model for the global oil market, we search for the producer tax that maximizes the government's discounted tax revenue in Norway. The oil market model explicitly accounts for reserves, development and production in 4 field categories across 15 regions. The oil companies optimize their profit and we study how different tax rates influence their investment and production profiles over time. Our results show that a net tax rate in the range of 83 to 87 percent gives the highest tax revenue over a wide range of oil prices and government's discount rates. However, to avoid premature policy recommendations based on assumptions that are more or less uncertain, we carry out various sensitivity analysis in the favor of lower taxes. These analysis show that it is generally never optimal to reduce the prevailing net tax rate of 78 percent. Only in a very pessimistic scenario regarding costs and exploration is it optimal with a minor reduction in the tax rate. Hence, even if many regard Norway as a high tax province, a robust conclusion seem to be that reducing the present tax level on oil production will not boost investment and production to such a degree that discounted tax revenue increases. We emphasize that such a conclusion holds whether the oil companies are constrained by credit or not.

National wealth can be divided into real capital, financial capital, human capital and natural resource wealth. We use the National Accounts measures to illustrate the development of the wealth from 1930 to 1995, with special focus on the contribution from the natural resources. Norway is often described as an economy that is very dependent on its natural resources. However, apart from the petroleum sector, the resource rent for the natural resource sectors was generally small or negative over this period. This may indicate that these industries to a large degree fulfilled political goals as stimulating employment possibilities in sparsely populated areas. The contribution from the traditional natural resources to the national wealth declined somewhat over the period. Norway seems to have been just as dependent on these traditional natural resources in the 1930s as we were on the natural resource industries in the nineties, when we in addition extracted oil and gas. This may be somewhat surprising, as a common apprehension is that Norway becoming an oil producer to a large extent increased the importance of the natural resources in the economy. The most important economic resource throughout the period was a highly qualified labour force, varying from 60 to 80 percent of the total national wealth in most years. In years with strong technological progress human capital reached over 80 percent of the total wealth, as development in know-how and technology ascribes to this category of wealth.