Methodology

Panel construction

The published view is a province × yearbinary treatment panel covering African ADM1 regions, 2000–2024. A province-year is coded CRM_active = 1 if at least one critical-raw-material mine within its boundary had a recorded owner that year.

Construction proceeds in three steps:

1. Reshape S&P’s 25 historical-owner columns (one per year, 2024 → 2000) into long form (mine_id, year, owner); mark a mine-year as active if owner is present.
2. Spatially join each mine’s lat/lon to the Natural Earth 10 m ADM1 polygon containing it (nearest-neighbour fallback for coastal / borderline cases).
3. Aggregate to province-year: CRM_active(GID_1, year) = max(active mines that year).

Data sources

• S&P Global Metals & Mining (Properties database). Mine-level records: name, location (lat/lon), country, primary commodity, ownership history per year. Filtered to African properties; commercial dataset.
• Natural Earth 10 m Admin-1 States & Provinces. Public-domain sub-national boundaries used for the spatial join. naturalearthdata.com. GADM v3.6 was the original choice in the underlying R pipeline; we use Natural Earth 10 m here for network-fetch reliability and a near-equivalent province count (~908 vs ~1,000).

Caveats

• Ownership ≠ operation. A non-null historical-owner field indicates a mine was on the books that year, not that it was physically producing. Active vs Inactive operational status is captured separately in the per-mine actv_status field.
• Spatial-join slack. Two mines were snapped >50 km from their reported coordinates to the nearest ADM1 polygon (typically coastal points or imprecise coords).
• Coverage skew. 529 mines are concentrated in a handful of mineral-rich economies (DRC, South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Namibia together account for >65 % of records). Many African provinces register no treatment in this dataset; that means S&P has no commercially-tracked mine there, not that no extraction occurs.
• Commodity classification. Each mine has one PRIMARY_COMMODITY field. Multi-commodity operations (frequent in copper-cobalt belts) are present in the underlying COMMODITIES_LIST column but only the primary tag is exposed in the published views.

Future expansion

The R pipeline behind this dataset (in the source folder, not redistributed) joins many more data layers onto the same province-year skeleton. A later release of this site is expected to add:

• UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset (GED v25.1). Annual conflict-event counts and battle-related deaths per province.
• ACLED Armed Conflict Location & Event Data. Protests and riots per province-year.
• World Bank WGI / WDI. Six governance indices and seven economic indicators at the country-year level.
• EPR ethnic-politicization indicators.
• Spatial & temporal lags (KNN-10 and 1-year lags) for network-style analyses of cross-province spillovers.

Citation

If you use this dataset, please cite the underlying source paper (forthcoming) and the data source: