Myanmar: Online portal on jade aims to increase transparency of the sector
"New data demysitify Myanmar's jade sector," 02 August 2018
Myanmar's gemstone sector is opaque and unaccountable. In 2017, the country scored just 27 of a possible 100 points and ranked 83rd among 89 assessments in the Resource Governance Index. However, new data are helping observers to unpack this sector and inform eventual reform.
In March 2018, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative’s (EITI) Myanmar office published its second report covering financial years 2014-16...
The disclosed data on jade include company profiles, legal ownership information, lists of licences, production and export amounts, tax payments and revenue flows to various government agencies, and social spending...
Digesting the huge amount of data released, however, is no easy task. The information is spread across various documents and in different formats. This poses a challenge for extractive sector observers to analyse, and makes it even more daunting for the general public to understand. The Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI) launched a public data portal on the jade industry in May, in part to address these challenges.
The aim of “Open Data: Myanmar Jade” is to unpack the new EITI data and, in combination with available data from other sources such as the government, to present rigorous and impartial information... The first data story re-examines the possible size of the jade industry, which had been estimated for 2014 between US$5 billion to $31 billion by Global Witness and around $15 billion by the Harvard Ash Center - Proximity Designs. This contrasted to the official government estimate of $1.5 billion.
The portal is also intended to support ongoing government and civil society efforts to increase transparency of the jade sector. Domestic and international attention, for the past few years, has been trained on jade, a resource characterised by illegal trade and a huge amount of uncollected state revenues; links to domestic conflicts and the peace process; and environmental and social disasters, such as unregulated, mass migration of workers with no safety regulations.
Since the launch of Open Data: Myanmar Jade, the Myanmar EITI has replicated the jade portal on its website and has been working on similar tools for some of the other sectors covered by the initiative — namely oil, gas and minerals.
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Open Data: Myanmar Jade may be accessed here.