Bolivia's gold miners escape state taxes, reversing resource reform
Bolivia has strengthened state control over natural gas and lithium extraction, but its most profitable export—artisanal gold—remains lightly taxed and barely monitored. Powerful cooperative miners have effectively captured government policy, costing the state billions in lost revenue that could fund infrastructure and services.
Originaltitel: A golden limit to neo-extractivism: policies and patterns of resource rent capture in Bolivia
Bolivia is often seen as an example of a new pattern of managing natural resources extraction – neo-extractivism – in which the state assumes a greater degree of control and appropriates more of the resulting rents. That is indeed the case when it comes to most of the country’s natural gas production, planned lithium extraction and metal mining. But in the case of the currently most valuable export product, gold produced by cooperative small scale miners, the pattern is reversed. These operations are lightly taxed and operate with very limited official supervision and control, despite the urgent need to draw in additional revenues to the state. In discussing the reasons for this difference, we highlight technical aspects related to small-scale gold mining and the fact that the cooperative gold miners are numerous and a well-organised group which governments can ill afford to alienate. This has led to a situation of state capture ‘from below’, in which a significant part of the country’s natural wealth is extracted with limited benefits generated for the state and the population at large, in turn resulting in a pattern that is not so different from previous ones, only with a different group of producers benefiting