Browsing by Subject "Ontario"

The objective of this master’s thesis is to assess the sufficiency of mining compensation payable to the landowner according to Finland’s Mining Act and compare mineral royalties in selected developed countries. The study aims to answer how the Finnish Mining Act secures the landowner’s economic interests from both land use and mineral extraction, how the state benefits from mining and what are it’s costs and how Finland is placed in an international comparison of mineral royalties. The study familiarizes the reader with the economic theory of non-renewable resources and royalties, the different royalty types and their ability to serve varying objectives, the economic problems related to the rule of capture and the potential negative effects to a country’s economy from non-renewable resources. The study also takes a look at the Finnish mining industry and it’s working environment. The sufficiency of mining compensation from land use was assessed by comparing the discounted area based compensation to the bare land value of forests in different heat summation zones. The production based mining compensation was assessed by comparing the current level to the level of the previous mining act derived from different sources. The benefits from mining to the state were assessed from the employment objectives of the mining act and from overviewing the costs of promoting the mining industry. The countries selected to the international comparison were ones that had placed well in the Fraser Institute Survey of Mining Companies. The royalty practices of each country were sought from their mining legislation and applied to two differently performing Finnish mines according to their public records. According to the findings, the area based mining compensation is sufficient in northern Finland, but not without fail in central and southern Finland. Nevertheless, there has been improvement from the previous mining act regarding both area based and production based mining compensation. The state’s benefits from the employment perspective seem to be asserted, but impermanently. Findings from the international comparison imply that mining compensations in Finland are equivocally from the smaller side of the comparison.