Unaccompanied Miners: Bolivia's child laborers

Vice: In 1936, George Orwell visited a coal mine in Grimethorpe, England. “The place is like… my own mental picture of hell,” he wrote of the experience. “Most of the things one imagines in hell are there—heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and, above all, unbearably cramped space.” Orwell was a lanky guy, 6'3" or 6'2", and I am too. So I was reminded of his comparison recently while crawling through a tunnel as dank and dark as a medieval sewer, nearly a mile underground in one of the oldest active mines in Latin America, the Cerro Rico in Potosí, Bolivia. The chutes were so narrow that I couldn’t have turned around—or turned back—even if I’d wanted to.

Orwell wasn’t the first to equate mines with hell; Bolivian miners already know they labour in the inferno. In the past 500 years, at least 4 million of them have died from cave-ins, starvation, or black lung in Cerro Rico, and as a sly fuck-you to the pious Spaniards who set up shop here in 1554 and enslaved the native Quechua Indians, Bolivian miners worship the devil—part of a schizophrenic cosmology in which God governs above while Satan rules the subterranean...

The makeshift oil industry in rebel-held Syria

Vice: It’s a very different place than it was prerevolution, but it is still an oil town, albeit one of an entirely new sort. Instead of multinational corporations, it’s now the Islamist rebels who are providing jobs to the locals...

PlayStation 4 Sales and Violence in Eastern Congo

MARCOS MÉNDEZ:   ...the presence of stationary armed groups is strongly associated with increased economic activity in those areas where they can raise taxes and as long as the price of coltan is high. Therefore, if more PlayStations are sold and the price of coltan increases, the violence could also flare up in the villages formerly held by the M23 in the short term, as armed groups will try to “conquer” them and settle there to extract their resources as soon as possible...

Directed Technological Change and Resources

Why Nations Fail: ...dirty technologies are more advanced than clean technologies based on wind, solar power or geothermal (and even, more controversially, nuclear power). Given this state, directed technological change implies that private incentives will encourage firms and researchers to invest more in using and improving these dirty technologies — clean technologies are just too far behind and won’t be competitive, so it wouldn’t make private sense for people to invest much in them... Though the market without intervention fails and fails badly (think environmental disaster), government intervention can be hugely powerful because it leverages the endogeneity of technology and, as Simon posited, the power of the market to generate new technologies. If the government intervenes and subsidizes clean research, then this can powerfully stave off an environmental disaster...

Is Kazakhstan vulnerable to natural resource curse?

UNU-WIDER WP: This study utilizes panel data from 14 provinces of Kazakhstan and investigates the link between the point-source resources (oil and gas) and economic growth via institutional quality. Labour force migration from manufacturing to non-traded sector occurs as a result of wage increase in the manufacturing sector while its production price is determined and pinned down by the world market. On top of that, the manufacturing sector costs increase even more as a consequence of the price increase of non-traded goods used as inputs in the manufacturing sector. Although, the impact of interaction terms of diffuse resource (wheat) production and institutional quality is not observed, diffuse resources deteriorate the economic growth through wheat price volatility. The wheat price spikes lead to institutional inefficiencies. Moreover, rent-seeking activities of intermediaries in agricultural sector further undermine the economic growth.

ENERGY ABUNDANCE AND THE END OF ECONOMICS

Pieria:  A combination of technological advances and an abundance of labour combines to drive down the cost of production and increase potential supply exponentially. The only constraints to supply are aggregate demand limitations and volatility in energy costs...

Coal part of solution for climate change, says UN climate chief

Mining Innovation: Christina Figueres, UN climate chief, has said that coal power can be part of the solution in dealing with climate change. At the International Coal and Climate summit in Warsaw, Figueres told delegates that they had “the opportunity to be part of the worldwide climate solution” by turning off old coal plants, capturing and storing carbon from new plants and leaving most of the coal reserves in the ground. While she said that coal power would help alleviate poverty and propel economic growth in poorer countries, the industry “must change”.