This thesis focuses on three aspects of long-run planning for mineral-dependent economies: (i) modelling mineral depletion for optimal capital accumulation; (ii) specification and estimation of a mining cost function and a non-mining production function; and (iii) measurement of capital and natural resource stocks. Zambia, a country totally dependent on copper, is used as a case study. The planning model integrates the Ramsey capital model with the Hotelling-Scott exhaustible resource model, utilizing recent advances in dynamic optimization and duality theory. The optimal rate of resource extraction requires that marginal variable cost plus user cost be equal to the world price of the mineral. The user cost of the resource grows at the rate of interest plus the rate of population growth minus the effect of depletion on extraction cost. The optimal allocation of resource revenues equates the marginal benefits from alternative uses: (i) current consumption to raise the standard of living of a growing population; (ii) mining investment to maintain production in the face of deteriorating resource quality; and (iii) non-mining investment to create an industrial base as an alternative to the depleting resource. A variable cost function (VCF) for the mining industry is derived from the assumption that the mining firm minimizes the variable cost of producing a given output. The parameters of a translog VCF for Zambian copper mining are estimated and found to be consistent with the underlying theory. It is also found that domestic labour is only imperfectly substitutable for imported machinery and that labour demand is not very responsive to changing wages. A substantial portion of the empirical contribution is the construction of comprehensive data series for Zambia using the perpetual inventory approach to capital stocks, Divisia, Indexes, and the neoclassical theory of rental prices. Production figures for individual mines are used to construct aggregate cumulative series to which a curve of diminishing increments is fitted to obtain andestimate of the Zambian copper resource. / Arts, Faculty of / Vancouver School of Economics / Graduate

The aim of this study is to investigate the role of CONFLICT in the stratificationary process of the African in the Copper Mining Industry of Northern Rhodesia between the years 1943 - 1961. The hypothesis and assumptions which it is desired to prove can be classified as falling into four categories: 1. that which accepts human beings as individuals acting in group structures, each group having its appropriate goals and ends forming discernable patterned action systems; 2. that these groups can be reconstructed to show variable patterns of action which might be either accommodative or initially contradictory as conflicts emerge within the system; 3. that items 1 and 2 above can be objectivised by empirical materials and that they change in time, and, in so doing, are modified in structure-functional relations; 4. that conflict is the process which animates the patterns and prescribes new goals and ends within the patterned activity systems. An indefinite number of causality factors are possible in explaining social change, but we confine ourselves to the concept CONFLICT, with special reference to the Copperbelt of Northern Rhodesia. The economic factors operating, together with the political and social factors, producing a typical stratification of the African in the industry, sofar as this reveals changing patterns of progressive and aggressive goal thrusts and redefinition of the social positions of the contesting participants, are dealt with in the appropriate sections of this investigation. The model has been developed in relation to the study of the total social system with special emphasis on their overtly political and economical aspects. Part 1, in its entirety, deals with the theory of conflict. It also contains our own development of the theme. The empirical data are contained in parts 2, 3, with a section on envisaged future social developments. The conclusion, to this investigation, forms the last part , with an exhaustive testing of the TEN-POINT HYPOTHESIS given at the end of Part 1.

Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Humanities of the University of the Witwatersrand Department of Sociology/ Global Labour University, in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of MA Labour and Development, Labour Policy &Globalization, 2015 / This study investigates the environmental costs of copper mining in a mining Township of Kankoyo in Mufulira, Zambia. It investigates the ways in which the mine workers in this community experience, assess and respond to the pervasive environmental degradation caused by mining operations. The study indicates that the people of Kankoyo have an implied understanding (physical experiences e.g. smoke, dust etc.) of the risks in their environment but lack explicit knowledge (long term effects). Second, the working class are now in an awkward position between participating in activism against the company that pollutes their environment and the need to keep their jobs. Third, experiences with a polluted environment have divided the Kankoyo between those who engage in community mobilisation (the unemployed) and those who don’t because they want to protect their jobs (the mine workers). As experiences take a gender dimension, women tend to suffer more due to the gender roles they play. Fourth, given their helplessness, the people of Kankoyo now plead for social services not in social justice terms but as a compensation for the pollution suffered. The core conclusion is that workers understand environmental threats but: (a) they have little awareness of the long-term effects and (b) they tend to minimise them. For these workers their economic security i.e. employment, is primary and they prioritise the immediate over the longer term, thus (c) they have not responded to this issue in an organised way, rather their unions tend to focus on traditional workplace/pay issues. In addition, state and environmental organisations’ responses are inadequate. Consequently, the community is forced to accept the negative environmental impacts on their lives and the environment. Therefore, the study makes the following arguments: (a) Mineral resource led development in Zambia has failed. Instead, it has led to devastating environmental and health impacts on the nearby communities; (b) that the provision of social services and housing to the mine workers, and revenue to the government only served to divert attention from the long term and ongoing environmental degradation that has taken place overtime. The slug dams, the accumulated dust heaps, leach plants and long term environmental degradation on the copperbelt attest to this; (c) that the corporate policy on housing only served the interests of the mining companies by stabilising the workforce without regard for the arising health impacts; and; (d) privatisation has increased the vulnerability of the working class to environmental costs of mining. In the end, from the shattered hopes of a good life ‘modernisation’ emerges in the words of one respondent a ‘development’ of ‘environmental suffering’, as Kankoyo remains a ‘bomb waiting to explode’. / XL2018

Even though the West, or Global North, initiates extensive development policymaking and project activity on the African continent, this study argues that one source of major frustration between different parties entrusted to do the work arises from cognitive differences in their worldviews. These differences affect people's actions and have theological ramifications involving how we all understand meaning and reality. The study employs a case method analyzed through the lens of Alfred Schutz's sociology of knowledge theories and augmented by insights from African scholars to look at basic perceptual differences between Zambians and expatriates working on the Copperbelt Province's mines. After exploring how participants in the study interpreted various experiences, this study concludes that Zambians and expatriates were essentially living in "parallel universes" of meaning regardless of their apparently shared activities and objectives. The study further argues that viewpoints expressed by Zambian participants can be extrapolated into powerful lessons for members of civil society who are concerned about international development and the environment. Such teaching elements could especially help reshape how Americans and other Westerners understand ourselves in relation to physical creation and the cosmos as well as to those from radically different cultures. Lessons learned from the Zambian perspective could also help reinvigorate Western theological thinking, providing much needed critiques of discourses that currently dominate international development policymaking and planning and that determine value principally according to economic strategies and fulfillment of efficient, measurable objectives. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2007.