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# **Annex: Supporting Country Information**

## **Algeria**

Algeria last issued prices for liquid fuels in Executive Decree 07/60 of February 11, 2007. The decree set prices retroactively effective January 1, 2007, and the government has frozen prices since. The end‐user prices are among the lowest in the world. The price of LPG sold in 35‐kg cylinders, for example, has been fixed at DA 400, equivalent to about US$120 a tonne. To put this in context, Sonatrach, Algeria’s national oil company, sold LPG between January 2007 and September 2015 on the international market at an average FOB price of US$700 a tonne. For market‐based end‐user prices, to US$700 must be added the costs of bottling, storage, transport, retailing, and any applicable taxes. The two crude oil prices for refineries (the price varies by refinery) have been decoupled from the world oil price and fixed in local currency units since 2007. Although the dollar equivalent depends on the prevailing exchange rate, the prices have been less than US$25 a barrel.

According to Executive Decree 10/21 of January 2010, domestic natural gas prices are meant to be adjusted annually, but they have not been. The transfer price of natural gas for power generation appears to have been fixed since 2005 at a mere US$0.23/mcf (http://www.mem‐ algeria.org/fr/statistiques/c_tarification_prp.htm).

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) reported in 2014 that the total implicit subsidies (not involving budgetary transfers) for hydrocarbons in 2012 amounted to 10.9 percent of GDP. The government published the cost of implicit subsidies in an appendix to the 2014 budget law for the first time, and had planned to do so again for the 2015 budget (IMF 2014k).

The regulatory agency had some years earlier recommended raising petroleum product prices by DA 2 (US$0.02) per liter every year for a decade, but the proposal was not accepted. In June 2015, the Minister of Energy reported that the government was conducting a study on the rationalization of fuel consumption to address inefficient fuel use and fuel smuggling ( _Liberté_ 2015).

On December 30, 2015, the president signed the finance law of 2016. It raises the VAT on diesel, electricity (for consumption exceeding 250 kWh per quarter), and natural gas (for consumption exceeding 250 mmBtu per quarter) from 7 percent to 17 percent (Algeria 2015). Arguing that no country can sustain generalized subsidies of DA 1.8 trillion (US$17 billion), the finance minister earlier in the same month announced that Algeria would follow Morocco in gradually reforming subsidies until prices reach their “true” values ( _Magazine du Manager_ 2015).

## **Angola**

Angola froze liquid fuel prices for four years from September 2010 until September 2014, when the prices of gasoline, kerosene, diesel, and LPG were all raised. The prices of gasoline and diesel were raised again three months later in December 2014. An executive decree issued in December 2014 gave estimations of remaining subsidies after the price increase (Angola 2014). They were large, but based on implausibly high unsubsidized prices for some products: US$2.22 per kg of LPG, US$1.47 per liter of gasoline, US$1.38 per liter of kerosene, and US$0.98 per liter of diesel, all before any taxes were levied.