Working Paper
New industrial policy and the extractive industries
Industrial policy is back. Advocates for industrial policy argue that the important question is not whether such policies should be applied at all, but how to design and implement them. For the extractive industries this development poses a challenge...
Working Paper
Protecting the environment during and after resource extraction
Natural resources extraction inevitably imposes environmental injuries including diversion of scarce water away from pressing local needs, disruption of fragile ecosystems, and longer-range and often irreparable harm. These fall most forcefully on...
Working Paper
Extractive industries and development
In common with several other low-income African economies, in recent years Mozambique has seen a significant expansion of interest and investment in its long-established extractives industries. Huge new gas finds in particular have led to...
Research Brief
Potential benefits and pitfalls of extractives in Mozambique
Mozambique has seen a significant expansion of interest and investment in its extractive industries. New gas finds in the past ten years have led to expectations that these industries will contribute very significantly to the country’s future...
Working Paper
Rowing against the current
The exploitation of natural resources is a huge opportunity, but one that carries considerable risks. Relative prices in resource-exporting economies tend to push them towards economic structures dominated by the resource sector. This paper explores...
Working Paper
Extractives for development
Countries face both challenges and opportunities in using their extractive industries to achieve more inclusive development—particularly in the developing world. Yet while a large national income can result from resource wealth, it can also be...
Working Paper
Uganda’s oil
We study Uganda’s journey to become a petroleum producer and provide estimates regarding the size and timing of the oil revenues to be expected. At an average US$38 per capita per year over a 33-year period, oil revenue by itself will not be...
Working Paper
Tax provisioning by extractive industry multinational subsidiaries
Extractive industries are spread across mining of metal and minerals, oil and gas, among others. Multinationals in these sectors are confronted with different challenges ranging from corruption, political risk, economic uncertainty, sunk costs, and...
Working Paper
Illicit financial flows and country-by-country reporting in extractive industries
Economic data are important in governing the international political economy. Some of the most widely used macro statistics risk being undermined by systematic misalignment in reporting of economic activity due to illicit financial flows, as well as...
Research Brief
Oil in Ghana
Working Paper
Local content, supply chains, and shared infrastructure
Local content policies in the context of extractive industries have attracted increased interest in recent years. Most countries with a significant extractive industry have included local content requirements either in their legislation or...
Working Paper
Capturing economic and social benefits at the community level
Civil society organizations have played various roles in promoting the capture of benefits from and protection against the negative impacts of extractive industries. Payment disclosure is one potentially powerful tool for such organizations to...
Working Paper
The role of gender in the extractives industries
In recognizing that women’s participation and gender equity is a precondition for the achievement of acceptable development outcomes, extractives industry companies are increasingly making public commitments to integrating gender equality, inclusion...
Working Paper
Optimal local content for extractive industries
Tanzania is rich with natural resources, which have significant potential to contribute to the country’s economic development. Several laws recently passed in Tanzania are dedicated to establishing linkages between foreign firms in natural resource...
Working Paper
Mozambique—bust before boom
This paper is a sequel to an earlier paper that looked in broad terms at many of the issues that Mozambique faces today in managing its new extractive resources. The paper first describes the investment surge that has already been prompted by new gas...
Book
Mining for Change
For a growing number of countries in Africa the discovery and exploitation of natural resources is a great opportunity, but one accompanied by considerable risks. Countries dependent on oil, gas, and mining have tended to have weaker long-run growth...
Working Paper
What are the prospects for Mozambique to diversify its economy on the back of ‘local content’?
In recent years, Mozambique has made international headlines for the significant hydrocarbon deposits found offshore. These have increased the country’s extractive resource endowments, in addition to its mining and onshore natural gas sector. It is...
Working Paper
Downstream activities
The paper discusses the practical possibilities of achieving increased downstream processing and the policies that are commonly used for this purpose. It reviews the reasons why forward vertical integration is not always an optimal choice for...
Working Paper
Transparency in extractive industry commodities trading
The paper reviews the debate about transparency in extractive industry commodities trade. It examines the obstacles to improved transparency. A critical review of the experience with estimating losses from a lack of transparency concludes that many...
Policy Brief
Mining for change
For a growing number of countries in Africa the discovery of natural resources is a great opportunity, but one accompanied by considerable risks. There is an extensive literature linking natural resource dependence to poor economic performance. One...
Working Paper
The potential of extractive industries as anchor investments for broader regional development
The paper reviews what we know about the possibilities of designing and implementing policy measures that raise the contribution of the extractive industries’ production/consumption links to economic growth and wellbeing, and reviews how policies...
Working Paper
Natural resources, institutions, and economic transformation in Mozambique
In the light of Mozambique’s natural resources boom—especially its large-scale investments in mining, oil, and gas—this paper analyses the prospects for the extractive industries to contribute to economic transformation from an institutional...
Working Paper
Revenue forecasting in the mining industries
Robust forecasting of mining sector revenues is key to effective budgeting (and broader fiscal management) in many resource-rich countries.However, this is challenging in practice, given commodity market volatility, the extended lags (and often...
Working Paper
The role of participation in sustainable community development programmes in the extractives industries
A major challenge for almost all extractives activity is that benefits accrue predominantly at the national level while disruptions are invariably highly localized close to the resource. Recently, extractives companies have intensified efforts to...