2016
Since the 1980s, the mining industry has experienced vertical disintegration along with an increasing knowledge-intensity of their activities. This change is creating new opportunities for innovative local suppliers based in developing mining economies to enter into global supply chains of knowledge-intensive products and services offered not only to the mining industry but also to other industries. In Latin America, some countries are currently looking for ways to take advantage of this opportunity, extending the positive causality of the extractive industry via policy measures to support the emergence and development of knowledge-intensive products and services to the mining industry and simultaneously enhance the competitiveness of mining operations and diversify the economy.
This paper tries to illustrate such challenges by studying two current initiatives to develop local productive and technological linkages by enhancing the capabilities of suppliers and their context, namely, the “World Class Supplier Program” in Chile, launched in 2009 by BHP Billiton to later became a national policy that followed a public-private partnership (PPP) approach, and “Developing Suppliers of Excellence” in Peru, run by Antamina without government involvement.