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Presenter: Sarah Dienta

Faculty Sponsor: Kevin L. Young

School: UMass Amherst

Research Area: Globalization and Development

Session: Poster Session 1, 10:30 AM - 11:15 AM, Auditorium, A67

ABSTRACT

For more than 150 years there has been international corporate mining all over the world and has affected the lives of miners, low income countries, civilians, and the environment. This study seeks to evaluate the impacts that these foreign mining companies have on low and lower middle income countries. It seeks to explore how it affects the people living there and whether these effects change depending on how strict the regulations in that country are. This study hypotheses that the stricter the regulation is on mining the better the outcome will be for the country and its civilians. This study will look at a sample of about five lower middle and low income countries, as defined by the World Bank, and look through their history of mining regulations since the 1990s and compare that with their Human Development Index, employment status, environmental status, electricity, etc in the country around that time to five years later, to see if the time periods of stricter regulations had any impact on the country’s wellbeing. This study will pick six countries from the list of low and lower middle income countries that have the most exports and highest percentage of GDP related to their mining activities. The results could demonstrate how important regulations or deregulations can be for building an economy, while using foreign assets, and how it can be done without harming local communities.