A safer bet? Evaluating the effects of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative on mineral investment climate attractiveness

The Extractives Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) is a governmental initiative focused on improving transparency and accountability within resource-rich countries. Given EITI implementation is entirely voluntary, and time and resource intensive in nature, demonstrating the benefits of implementation for participating countries is important to the initiatives long term success. Using panel data for 167 countries from 2003 to 2014, this article analyses the impact of EITI implementation on a country's mineral investment attractiveness, represented here by the amount of grassroots corporate mineral exploration expenditure within a country. The results suggest that EITI implementation does have a statistically significant positive impact on a country's ability to attract mining company investment. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.