# from 1984 to 2010.

Of the 874 mines in Africa, 275 are matched to a geographical cluster in the DHS data. All clusters are matched to mines, but not all mines are matched to clusters. This is because some mines are located in remote and sparsely populated areas or are densely clustered, or because we have no DHS sample for the country (e.g., South Africa). Considering only the mines that are closest to at least one cluster, 51 mines had opened by 1984, 109 mines opened during the following 26 years, and 90 mines closed during the same period (see Appendix Table A.3).

This is, to our knowledge, the only existing mine production panel dataset. While the quality with respect to the exact levels of production is uncertain, the state of the mine (inactive, active, or suspended) is reliable. The metric used in reporting production volumes differs between companies producing the same mineral. Comparisons of production volumes are thus not possible.

The RMD data focuses on mines of industrial size and production methods, often with foreign or government ownership. Most mines are owned by Canadian, Australian or UK listed firms. Since the 1990s Africa has experienced a rise in large-scale, capital-intensive production, and today the continent is an important producer of gold, copper, diamond, bauxite, chromium, cobalt, manganese, and platinum (UNECA, 2011). The industrial mine industry is heavy in capital and firms are often large and multinational. There are several production stages: exploration, feasibility, construction, operation and closure. In contrast to the later stages, the exploration phase is often undertaken by smaller firms who obtain a three year exploration license. Large mining firms enter mostly in the post-exploration phase. In the feasibility phase, the company determines if the deposit is viable for commercial exploration. If it is deemed so, the company will apply for a mining license. The average length of such a license is 23 years in Africa, and can be renewed upon termination. The licenses are obtained from the government and the application process takes on average 2 to 3 years (Gajigo et al., 2012). The mine life, i.e., the length of the production phase, depends on the ore deposits and the world price, among other things. In our data set, the average life length of a mine is ten years. After production, there is a reclamation process (Gajigo et al., 2012). Focusing on industrial scale production, the mines in the dataset constitute a subset of existing mines and deposits in the region, excluding small scale mines and informal or illegal mines. The external validity of the results from the main empirical strategy is therefore limited to large-scale mining.

Industrial mining may exist alongside or replace small-scale and artisanal mining (ASM). While the production levels of ASM-type activities are small, they are an important source of livelihood in Africa.<sup>5</sup> Twenty-one countries in Africa are estimated to employ more than 100,000 people each in ASM, with Ghana and Tanzania above one million people each. Together, these two countries are estimated to have 13.4 million people dependent on ASM (“dependent” implying indirect employment and families of miners) (UNECA, 2011). The current definition of small-scale mining operations includes a cap of 50 employees and operations that are labor

> 53.0–3.7 million people in Africa were estimated to be engaged in small-scale or artisanal mining at the end of the last century, according to the ILO (1999). A more recent report from the UN and African Union (UNECA, 2011) estimates that 8.1 million people are engaged in ASM.

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