Policy Dialogue "Social Costs in Mining Activities"

Policy Dialogue “Social Costs in Mining Activities”

Đăng vào 28/03/2023

Due to the multidimensional nature of the mining industry, within the framework of activities of the Vietnam Alliance for Tax Justice (VATJ), on March 28, 2023, in Hanoi, the Vietnam Center for Economic and Strategic Research (VESS) organized a Policy Dialogue with the theme “Social Costs in Mining Activities”. The dialogue aims to discuss, assess the impact, as well as create a dialogue space between the parties, contributing to promoting the effective exploitation and management of mineral resources. From there, propose recommendations and policies to overcome social costs in mining activities.

Documentation of the dialogue can be found at HERE.

Pictures at the dialogue are constantly updated at HERE.

At the opening of the Policy Dialogue, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Nguyen Duc Thanh, Director of VESS shared, the exploitation of mineral resources, especially on an industrial scale, is often associated with important socio-economic issues. Socio-environmental, can cause local social disturbances and lead to major conflicts of interest. Economically, the exploitation of resources is not properly managed both in the production stage and in the distribution of benefits. cannot be compensated. At the macro level, a country is heavily dependent on resource extraction, while low-quality institutions can lead to inefficient management of the value chain of the entire extraction process and cause a de-industrialization. This is a phenomenon where the mining industry overwhelms and destroys the motivation of creative manufacturing industries, accompanied by a vicious cycle of institutional corruption – autocracy due to the state taking advantage of the revenues obtained through resource extraction. Thereby, it creates a tendency to reduce the motivation to perform public accountability, as well as to not fulfill fiscal responsibility to taxpayers.

Research by VESS has shown that the current process of managing the mining industry in Vietnam is still inadequate. Institutionally, there are still many mineral activities that are not regulated in the Law on Minerals and are not synchronized with other laws. In addition, the promulgation of documents guiding the completion of construction is still slow, the policy and legal system have not really paid attention to the development of downstream mineral activities. The coordination among related agencies is not good, this is partly due to the shortage of human resources, especially at the grassroots level… Although the management agencies have sought to monitor mining activities. exploitation of enterprises to ensure correct and sufficient declaration, but the actual implementation still has many inadequacies, causing troubles, costs and difficulties for enterprises and in fact it is not difficult for enterprises to circumvent. or give reasons for not complying with these provisions.

Attending the Program, the delegates listened to an overview of the Mining Industry Strategy and policy recommendations. The dialogue focused on discussing the content around the topic of “Promoting the participation of the people in order to properly and adequately calculate the social costs of mining”.