DBA defense at MSM: can regulation reduce the resource curse risk?

The MSM DBA program is recommended to all who strive to undertake quality applied research.” This said Ms. Sheila Mziray after successfully defending her DBA thesis: “Can Regulation Reduce the Resource Curse Risk? The Case Study of Gold Value Chain Actors in Tanzania” at Maastricht School of Management on 10 May 2016.

“I became interested in gold after reading a lot of complaints in our daily newspapers and other media on emerging conflicts in the mining sector in Tanzania especially after the country had created laws that encouraged foreign investors,” she explained. “These national laws along with international ones prevail in Tanzania and a major question that is answered in the current research has to do with the nature of interactions of public and private regulations at national and international levels. Are the regulations complementing, competing or overlapping? Are these interactions facilitating actors within the gold value chain contribute towards escaping the resource curse risk?”

Her journey to answer the questions deployed an exploratory undertaking that has shown thatthe interactions of public and private regulations are facilitating actors within the gold value chain to a limited extent. She describes her DBA journey as: “a challenging and an interesting experience as I got an opportunity to meet various respondents including politicians, trade and mining officials along with gold value chain actors. The research has many dimensions and the facilitation I received from my supervisor, the reader and the two evaluators was very fruitful in aligning the different aspects.”