Australia - Even in the very civilized and minin

• Australia - Even in the very civilized and mining friendly country of Australia, the taxman is extracting his ever-increasing due. In a recent article , the BBC declared the Australian mining boom over. A new tax is part of the added burden.

"Another key area that has been a cause of concern, especially among miners, has been the introduction of taxes such as the mineral resources rent tax (MRRT) and the carbon tax. Under the MRRT, the government will impose a 30% tax on mining firms with an annual profit of more than A$75m ($79m; £50m). It will apply to firms that mine iron ore, coal and petroleum and impact about 30 of Australia's biggest miners, including BHP Billiton ( BBL ), Rio Tinto and Xstrata (XTA.L)."

• The Congo - It seems endemic in third world countries that tax treatment and ownership treaties are subject to unilateral modification by each successive administration of the sovereign. The Congo is no exception.

The Central African country, which has about half of global cobalt reserves and major deposits of copper and gold, is revising ten-year old mining regulations to boost revenue. Randgold and AngloGold Ashanti Ltd.'s Kibali gold project is scheduled to start production in 2013.

" Democratic Republic of Congo's decision to increase taxes under its mining code will harm investment," Mark Bristow , chief executive of Randgold Resources Ltd. (RRS) said today in Kinshasa, the capital. "We must all resist the temptation of having short-term gains from an industry still in its infancy," Bristow said. Congo's mines ministry just announced it wants to increase the government's stake in mining projects from 5 percent to 25 percent.

Mandated Beneficiation, a type of resource nationalization , is the concept, which enables a sovereign state to require that the ore from the mines have value added to it before leaving the country. Thus, the country benefits from the product enhancement through increases in employment, increases in supportive service industries and from the increase in taxable capital assets. In mining, this often means that a permit for a new mine would be tied to the funding and development of a smelter.

"Many governments are now seeking to have minerals beneficiated in-country prior to export. South Africa has announced a beneficiation strategy, as has Zimbabwe, Indonesia, Brazil and Vietnam. In theory, this will capture more of the value-chain as the products will achieve higher prices. " Ernst and Young .

from a long seeking alpha article-it benefits countries to do as much processing themselves as possible-China is doing what the imperialist countries use to do -get raw resource-develop and profit from processing-a smart country might aid vertical integration-like cwrn developing  a smelter onsite by not playing games w ore at port (dont know situation on that currently) and by providing necessary infrastructure-like a railroad.  Some countries are even requiring value added processing so they are not exploited so much