How do nationalised industries/resources generate government revenue?
The answer by Caliban is correct in its analysis of the value of nationalized industries, but doesn’t actually address the question. The real answer is that an ordinary company tries to make a profit for its owners. To the company, the taxes are just a cost of doing business, a cost they work very hard at keeping to a minimum. No country can afford to tax companies at so high a rate that it is no longer profitable to do business, so while the government is getting some money, so are the owners. Nor could a country tax different companies within the same industry at different rates. In an nationalized company, the country is the owner. That means that it gets not only the taxes the company pays, but also the profits that would ordinarily go to the private owners. That means the potential income to the country is higher. But the other element of nationalizing is in priorities. To a corporation, its primary responsibility is “shareholder value”. If that means shifting production offshore,
