Detecting Critical Mines: A Perspective from the Sky

The increased geopolitical and geo-economic importance of critical minerals requires a clear and accurate understanding of the nature of supply. Without this understanding, analysis of a range of key economic and policy questions will be based on systematically biased evidence and hence risks misinforming policy. This paper uses state-of-the-art techniques combining satellite imaging and artificial intelligence to detect mines and build a global mining database. A comparison of "new" and "old" techniques to record mines indicates a significant gap in the form of missing mines. 'Missing mines' tend to be relatively small but can be found across a wide array of institutional settings and may be associated with multiple sources of misreporting. That said, there is some evidence that countries with higher shares of smaller missing mine exhibit lower control of corruption. The comprehensive nature of our database is helpful to revisit environmental, social and developmental spillovers stemming from the rapidly growing number of critical mines linked to critical mines.