Since 1997, The Fraser Institute has conducted an annual survey of metal mining and exploration companies to assess how mineral endowments and public policy factors such as taxation and regulation affect exploration investment. Survey results represent the opinions of exploration managers in mining and mining consulting companies operating around the world. As the popularity of the survey has grown, we have expanded it to include more jurisdictions.

We now ask companies to give us their opinions about the investment attractiveness of 64 jurisdictions up from 53 last year. The jurisdictions include the Canadian provinces and territories (except Prince Edward Island), the Australian states, selected US states (this year Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, South Dakota, Utah, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming).

The additional jurisdictions in this year's survey are in Latin America, Oceania, Africa, and Eurasia. The Latin American jurisdictions include Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela, with the addition this year of Ecuador. Oceania includes Indonesia, New Zealand, and the Philippines, with the addition this year of Papua New Guinea. The largest expansion has been the additional inclusion of African states, which now include the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, South Africa, and Zimbabwe, with the addition of Botswana, Burkina Faso, Mali, Tanzania, and Zambia this year. Eurasian jurisdictions include India, Indonesia, Ireland, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Turkey, with the addition of Finland, Mongolia, Spain, and Sweden this year. Some of these additional jurisdictions were on the questionnaire in previous years, but did not receive a sufficient number of responses to include them in the survey. Expanded responses this year allowed inclusion.