One economic agent, usually the government, permits the extraction of mineral deposits, to be undertaken by a separate economic agent. Usually the extractor will pay an amount, often called royalties in the case of mineral resources, to the government for access to the resources. The issue arises as to how to allocate the resource rent that accrues from the extraction of the resource when the legal ownership and the economic ownership of the underlying resource is split. This then flows to consideration of the appropriate estimates of the value of the resource on the balance sheets of the different economic agents.