This paper is part of the PERC Policy Series of essays on timely environmental topics, published by the Property and Environment Research Center, a nonprofit research center located in Bozeman, Montana, that explores market solutions to environmental problems. instead of negotiation and cooperation. He concludes by briefly examining how alternative approaches could have bolstered human rights and economic opportunities in the eastern Congo. Parker finds that the legislation largely backfired, raising infant mortality in certain villages and also increasing militia violence against civilians. While the conflict-mineral measures may have reduced militia funding, the evidence suggests that they had the unintended effect of increasing human suffering. In this PERC Policy Series, economist Dominic Parker summarizes two recent academic studies in which he and coauthors examined the effects of the policy and whether it achieved its aims. The policy’s architects hoped that the disclosures would cut off funding to militias who brutalized locals, thereby reducing the suffering of people in affected communities. companies to disclose the provenance of tin, tungsten, and tantalum that they purchased. Section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Act tried to accomplish this aim by requiring U.S. In the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a principal source of such minerals, armed groups have been prevalent in mining, often controlling the trade in valuable minerals.Ĭongress passed legislation in 2010 that aimed to ensure purchases of such minerals would not fund violent militias. Widespread attention to so-called “conflict minerals” has led many consumers to ponder whether the metals contained inside their mobile phones or laptops have fueled civil wars and violence in far-flung places.
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