Background: Gold mining is a critical part of the industry of Central Asia, contributing significantly to regional economic growth. However, gold production management faces numerous challenges, including adopting innovative technologies such as AI, using improved logistical equipment, resolving...

This SSF Spotlight sheds a light of the gold value chain, emphasizing significant environmental, social, and governance (ESG) challenges encountered by diverse stakeholders. It builds on solutions proposed by Swiss investment actors to promote responsible ESG practices and positive impact. The...

The water footprint assessment for many products or processes has gained relevance; however, there are only a few aimed at the mining and metallurgy sector. The present study seeks to contribute a methodology to improve water footprint (WF) assessment in mining. The water footprint for the mining...

Over the past decade, illegal gold extraction has increased significantly in the Amazon region, partly due to the high international prices of this mineral, the less stringent attitude of some countries in relation to the environment and the pursuit of immediate economic opportunities....

Chinese universities in recent decades have experienced a wave of surging patenting activities. Is the increase in patenting activities evidence that Chinese universities have been catching up with their counterparts outside of China, or are there low-quality “patent bubbles” with the surge?...

Currently, artisanal and small-scale gold mining, known in the Brazilian Amazon as “garimpagem”, generates direct income to approximately 35,000 gold miners in the Tapajós region. Around 2,000 gold extraction areas are located in this region, operating various technical and organizational...

This paper investigates the impact of Fair Trade standards on the lives of artisanal gold miners in Ghana. In cooperation with ten mining companies - five of which voluntary enrolled in a program to implement these standards and become Fair Trade certified - I evaluated the impact of these...

The implementation of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programmes in Indonesia still largely involves charity to the community or efforts to earn a good name in the wider sphere. This is most especially the case in gold mining, where both large companies and community mining use hazardous...

Bitcoin is often labelled digital gold and many studies compare bitcoin and gold prices, returns and volatility. This paper digs deeper and compares the characteristics of bitcoin mining with gold mining to assess claims that bitcoin is digital gold. We identify twenty differences between gold...

This paper aims to fully exploit the heuristic virtues of Keynes’ famous ‘old bottles’ story, deploying a multi-layered argument and drawing out its broadest implications. We show that with this story Keynes was making a very serious point about anti-crisis policies: the need for...

"In the 1890s financial speculation and market manipulation were prominent features of the Southern African gold mining industry. Extravagantly capitalised, starved of working capital, and poorly managed, many mines could not be made to pay. Investors suffered more at the hands of Randlords than...

Anthropologists study the multiple meanings attributed to gold, as well as the multiple forms of knowledge of underground substances – be it geological knowledge, ideas about ‘gold as real anchor’ in the world of finance, or artisanal miners’ care in approaching gold as a capricious,...

In this paper, we study the return on investments in mining for a whole century, starting in the "Golden Age" of resource exploitation in the late nineteenth century. We use a sample of more than 1,000 mining companies, registered on the London Stock Exchange 1869- 1969, but operating on all...

Solidification/stabilization (S/S) is a low-cost and efficient method to enhance the mechanical properties of gold ore tailings (GOTs) and to decontaminate contaminated tailings. However, the traditional cement-based stabilization method has problems of environmental pollution and questionable...

Conventional economic theory assumes that firms always minimize costs given the output they produce. News articles and interviews with executives, however, indicate that firms from time to time engage in cost-cutting exercises. One popular belief is that firms cut costs when they are in economic...

In this paper, we study the return on investments in mining for a whole century, starting in the "Golden Age" of resource exploitation in the late nineteenth century. We use a sample of more than 1,000 mining companies, registered on the London Stock Exchange 1869- 1969, but operating on all...

This paper analyses the gold sector's environmentally-adjusted (carbon dioxide – CO 2 emissions) efficiency using cross-sectional global mine-level data from 2019. We use a meta-frontier approach to compute mine level efficiency under different technologies and environments (e.g., open pit vs....

Gold is a universal commodity traded across the world. The London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) fixes prices twice a day, known as AM and PM fix prices. This study is an attempt to find out whether the volume of gold consumption shows any significant impact on the world gold prices, known as...

Bergbau, soziale Konflikte und Umweltkatastrophen - seit den 1990er Jahren erlebt Lateinamerika einen historischen Rohstoffboom. Welche Rolle spielen die Betreiber der Minen in den Abbauregionen? Wie schaffen sie Akzeptanz unter der lokalen Bevölkerung? Und welche politischen Auswirkungen zieht...

Most research on illicit financial flows (IFFs) has focused on illicit outflows from developing countries and the role of non-state actors in generating IFFs. Less attention has been paid to processes and interfaces through which IFFs enter formal value chains-in effect being 'legalized' before...

This framework document provides a pragmatic approach for designing representative studies and developing uniform sampling guidelines to support estimates of morbidity that are explicitly linked to exposure to land-based contaminants from artisanal small-scale gold mining (ASGM) activities. A...