"Host countries will be at risk of reduced socioeconomic benefits as new technologies are rolled out." #autonomicFuture #readingToday

Our analysis suggests that host countries will be increasingly at risk of reduced socioeconomic benefits from mining as existing new technologies are further rolled out in the near and medium terms. The impacts will be primarily in terms of lost local employment and personal income tax revenue, but will also come from reduced employment-related local procurement.

The significance of these impacts will vary from case to case. At the community level they may be much more acute, while at the national level countries that depend more on mining economic activity will feel them more strongly. At first blush, several factors seem to indicate that the effects will be more significant in developed countries:
• The technologies surveyed will be more readily rolled out in high-wage host countries, where the economic proposition for investing to save labour is strongest.
• The largest absolute impacts on GDP and government revenue will come in countries where wages and personal income taxes are highest.
• Baseline domestic procurement tends to be higher in developed economies that are more capable of delivering local goods and services at qualities and quantities acceptable to the investors.

However, there are reasons to believe that developing countries will feel the social and economic development impacts more strongly than developed countries.