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Abstract

This chapter examines the relationship between the mining sector and environmental regulation, particularly whether stricter national environmental policies lead to increased environmental innovation in the mining sector, and whether higher stringency harms overall mining sector productivity. These hypotheses are tested using a panel dataset of 31 countries over 1990–2015, combining measures of EPS recently developed by the OECD, OECD data on mining sector productivity, and WIPO mining environmental patent-filing data. The chapter provides an overview of the mining sector’s relationship with the environment, environmental consequences of the extraction of the most economically important and prevalent minerals, and an overview of environmental regulation in each country, including mining-sector-specific regulations and more general environmental regulations, and mining environmental paten- filing patterns. The literature surrounding country-level environmental patent filing and the (weak) Porter hypothesis is reviewed, followed by a description of the dataset, its construction, and summary statistics, and results of the central regression analyses.

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