The Local Economic Impact of Mineral Mining in Africa: Evidence from Four Decades of Satellite Imagery

Using state-of-the-art techniques in computer vision, we analyze one million satellite images covering 12% of the African continent between 1984 and 2019 to track local development around 1,658 mineral deposits. We use stacked event studies and difference-in-difference models to estimate the impact of mine openings and closings. The magnitude of the effect of mine openings is considerable - after 15 years, urban areas within 20km of an opening mine almost double in size. We find strong evidence of a political resource curse at the local level. Although mining boosts the local economy in democratic countries, these gains are meager in autocracies and come at the expense of tripling the likelihood of conflict relative to prior the onset of mining. Furthermore, our results suggest that the growth acceleration in mining areas is only temporary and diminishes with the closure of the mine.