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...
Blog
What role for East African hydrocarbons in the global economy post-Paris COP21?
by
Evelyn Dietsche
October 2017
Over the past decade significant hydrocarbon discoveries have been made across East Africa. Unsurprisingly, the respective governments countries have...
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...
Blog
Forecasting revenues from extractive industries: Information asymmetries and other disadvantages of host governments
by
Alan R. Roe
February 2018
In the first part of this blog, Alan R. Roe writes about the difficulties governments face in predicting revenues from extractive industries. Read...
Blog
Information asymmetries in extractive industries: What can be done?
by
Alan R. Roe
February 2018
In the second part of this blog, Alan R. Roe discusses what is known about the informational failures that pose challenges for governments in...
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...
Blog
Want to catch up on UNU-WIDER research? Here are 10 of the most interesting papers published over the last year
In this blog, the managing editor of the WIDERAngle shares his personal view on some of the most important —and potentially overlooked— work recently...
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...
Blog
The zero carbon agenda and metals demand: some major dilemmas
by
Alan R. Roe
October 2021
The transition to net zero over the next few decades will involve a large increase in the global demand for many metals essential to the renewables...
Blog
The value of non-renewable resources in the era of climate change
by
Amir Lebdioui
October 2021
The economic decline of Nauru, an island in the Central Pacific, is a cautionary tale. Nauru was the highest GDP per capita country in the world in...
Blog
Looking ahead to COP26
The long-awaited COP26 in Glasgow is about to start. Billed as the most important COP to date, it is widely seen as a last chance to avoid a global...
Blog
Reducing wasted gas emissions is an opportunity for clean air and climate
by
Kathryn McPhail, Etienne Romsom
October 2021
The 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) is seen as the last best chance for countries and companies to set out how they are actually...
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...
Blog
Can natural resources jump-start industrialization?
by
John Page
January 2019
At the end of last year, I filmed a lecture that will be part of a massive open online course (MOOC) on industrialization in Africa. The course is...
Lecture
Public Economics Winter School 2017
The University of Pretoria will hold from 3-7 July 2017 the second Winter School – one of the key events in the public economics capacity building initiative managed by GTAC on behalf of the National Treasury.
Mon, 3 July 2017
–
Fri, 7 July 2017
University of Pretoria,
cnr Lynnwood Road and Roper Street,
Pretoria,
South Africa
Past event
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...
Project workshop
Extractive Industries: Taxation and Revenues
Thu, 5 November 2020
Zoom,
Finland
Past event
In the media
National media coverage on public forum on extractives
The Inclusive Growth in Mozambique programme organized a public forum on Extractive Industry and Development on 26 March 2019, in Maputo. The public forum explored the growing role and importance of oil and gas and mining in developing countries, as...
Presentation
Tony Addison gives a presentation on extractives at the OECD Development Centre seminar
Chief Economist and Deputy Director of UNU-WIDER, Tony Addison, is giving a presentation on 14 December at the OECD Development Centre’s seminar series Development in Transition. The seminar focuses on natural resources and sustainable development...
Fri, 14 December 2018
OECD,
Paris,
France
Past event
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...
Blog
Paralyzing debt burden threatens Africa’s largest economy
by
Geoffrey Adonu
June 2023
Apart from a ‘badly flawed’ national election, insecurity, and mass exodus of its young talents to the Global North (locally known as Japa), a...
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...