This blog was originally published on Illuminem, and has been co-authored with Rhian-Mari Thomas. She is the CEO...
Financing Climate & Sustainable Development / Report
Diagnosing how the sovereign ceiling functions as a simplifying shortcut that can obscure meaningful differences across borrowers, and proposing an alternative credit rating approach based on disaggregating sovereign risk into specific transmission channels.
Date: Apr 30, 2025
Time: EDT
Location: Online
The Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment (CCSI), in association with Steptoe LLP, hosted Session 2 of our four-part webinar series, Candid Reflections on Resource-Based Development.
A fundamental dimension of any equitable vision of a mining project relates to its financial benefit for the host state and community. The proposition of many large mining projects is indeed that the fiscal benefits of the project will be transformative for the host state; accordingly, many developing countries are eager to attract such projects, anticipating substantial revenues, along with jobs, community development, access to foreign markets, and development of local expertise. In practice, governments often struggle to secure the best possible returns, or find that anticipated revenues are offset by tax holidays and other fiscal loopholes. As risk takers and sources of capital and expertise, mining companies see it as legitimate that they reap substantial economic upsides from successful projects. Yet as the owner of the mineral resource, host states believe that the government should take the larger share. Many disputes relate to governments’ attempts to increase their take, when agreed fiscal terms fail to generate anticipated revenues, or where they seek to enhance the downstream benefits of projects by imposing local processing requirements. This panel explored this tension, and in particular, what a ‘fair deal’ looks like, and the possibility to define adequate benchmarks.
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