Review of Competitive Bidding Frameworks for Natural Resource Rights

Over the past decade, there has been a trend toward countries integrating competitive bidding provisions for mineral rights allocation into their national legislation and regulations. While there are potential advantages in using competitive bidding for mineral rights allocation over other methods, such as direct negotiation, little attention has been devoted to analyzing why this practice has only recently been embraced in mining and little empirical study has been done on whether, in fact, use of competitive bidding results in increased benefits to host countries. The VCC is surveying and analysing the trend with a view to providing tools for host countries to maximize the potentially positive benefits of competitive bidding.