system approach to analyze the productivity of a Colombian gold mining process

Abstract

Colombian  gold  mining  is  a  complex  system  characterized  by  interactions  between  individuals,  organizations  and  other  variables,  which  are  involved  in  the  system  behavior.  The  gold  mining  system  integrates  the  exploration,  extraction, dressing and commercialization processes. There are exogenous issues that affect the system performance and its productivity, and increase the complexity. These issues are of social, environmental, political, economical, technological and organizational types. In order to analyze this complexity, we develop a system dynamics model that allows characterizing the system and evaluating policies to improve productivity of a Colombian gold mining process. We simulate different scenarios of the model in which we can observe that  sustainable  investment  policies  increase  the  productivity  of  the  gold  mining system in Colombia. Increases of social capital promotion activities and physical infrastructure in the region of influence affect positively the multifactorial productivity of the Colombian gold mining process.