Abstract. We build a two-country model of endogenous growth to study the welfare e¤ects of taxes on tradable primary inputs when countries engage in asymmetric trade.We obtain explicit links between persistent gaps in productivity growth and the incentives of resource exporting (importing) countries to subsidize (tax) domestic resource use. The exporters'incentive to subsidize hinges on slower productivity growth and is disconnected from the importers' incentive to tax resource in ‡ows -i.e., rent extraction. Moreover, faster productivity growth exacerbates the importers'incentive to tax, beyond the rentextraction motive. In a strategic tax game, the only equilibrium is of Stackelberg type and features, for a wide range of parameter values, positive exporters'subsidies and positive importers'taxes at the same time.