Before the Oil: Suriname's Gold Economy as a Foreign-Exchange System — Stage 1 Registered Report

Programmatic Stage 1 Registered Report, prepared for submission to Peer Community In Registered Reports. Institut Atlantique Sud. Production from Suriname's offshore Block 58 is expected to begin in the first half of 2028. Its gold sector, the country's largest declared export, is already a matter of foreign-exchange policy: exporters must repatriate their proceeds and sell 35 per cent of them, since August 2026 directly to the central bank. Oil revenue may relieve the State's need for gold dollars, or it may pay for tighter control of the sector. This Stage 1 report sets out, before the event, how I will tell the two apart. The first test compares the gold that trading partners report importing from Suriname with what Suriname reports exporting. H1 predicts that this mirror ratio rises once Block 58 revenue becomes available to the State; its rival, H1′, predicts that it falls. Suriname publishes two official export series, its declaration to UN Comtrade and the central bank's own figures, and in five of the last seven years they differ by 7 to 12 tonnes. The ratio is therefore computed on both, and a branch is accepted only if both move by at least 0.25 in two of three scored years, together with a policy change, or a central-bank or IMF finding on enforcement, dated after the revenue starts. The second test, H3, asks whether anti-money-laundering weaknesses linked to gold reach the correspondent banks used for onshore, oil-related payments; it is tested against a null of no gold-linked transmission. None of the data that will decide the tests exists yet. The baseline data exist and have been published. The protocol is frozen in a public deposit, and an inconclusive result is defined in advance; with three annual observations per test, it is the most likely one. The protocol was frozen before this manuscript, as IAS Research Note No. 3, version 1.0 (doi:10.5281/zenodo.23186637). This deposit is the submission manuscript, not a revision of the protocol.