Mapping social conflicts in natural resources. A text-mining study in mining activities

Albrieu, Ramiro and Palazzo, Gabriel (2016): Mapping social conflicts in natural resources. A text-mining study in mining activities. Forthcoming in: CEPAL Review (2020)

Abstract

Applying text-mining techniques we have developed a methodology that measures the number of social conflicts related to the exploitation of nonrenewable natural resources. We focused on conflicts in four mining countries (Australia, Canada, Chile, and Peru) from 2003 to 2016 considering more than 20,000 articles from the major newspaper of each country. From our data we detected cross-country and cross-regional differences and changes in time patterns. We found a statically significant correlation between our main index and mineral rents in % in GDP. However, our results should be interpreted with caution since we have not taken into account endogeneity issues and our indexes could be biased by different level of lobby powers among our country sample. Our main contribution is the generation of novel database with different indexes of soft conflicts related to the exploitation of non-renewables natural resources and its media coverage in Australia, Canada, Chile and Peru.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: Natural resources, Conflicts, Text-mining
• Subjects: O - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth > O1 - Economic Development > O13 - Agriculture ; Natural Resources ; Energy ; Environment ; Other Primary Products; Q - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics ; Environmental and Ecological Economics > Q3 - Nonrenewable Resources and Conservation > Q32 - Exhaustible Resources and Economic Development; Q - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics ; Environmental and Ecological Economics > Q3 - Nonrenewable Resources and Conservation > Q34 - Natural Resources and Domestic and International Conflicts

References

Q32, Q34, O13