Before the Oil: Suriname's Gold Economy as a Foreign-Exchange System (pre-registration)

Pre-registration, version 1.0, frozen on deposit. Institut Atlantique Sud Research Note No. 3. Gold is Suriname's principal declared export, and its proceeds are a source of foreign exchange the State repeatedly tries to channel into the domestic market. Offshore oil from Block 58 is expected to start production by mid-2028. Production is not yet State revenue: oil can ease the State's need for gold dollars only once Block 58 receipts are available to the budget or the reserves, a date open at deposit. The note pre-registers two hypotheses, each with an indicator, a baseline, a treatment window and a numerical decision rule. H1: once oil receipts reach the State, the foreign-exchange motive for declaring gold weakens and the mirror-trade gap widens; its rival is that oil revenue funds tighter control. Because Suriname reports its gold exports twice, to UN Comtrade and in its central bank's export series, with up to 10 tonnes a year between them, the mirror ratio is read on both denominators, and a branch holds only if both move together. H3: anti-money-laundering weaknesses linked to gold reach the correspondent-banking channels used by onshore, oil-related payments; it is tested against a null. A third question is published as an exploratory series. What the note contributes is an instrument rather than a forecast: a frozen, public test read every six months until 2032 and published whatever its direction, with a dated event register and a mandatory update within 30 days of any threshold crossing. The reading is state to state; it names no natural or legal person and attributes no discrepancy to any actor. Protocol file RN03_protocol_v1_0.json, SHA-256 68f92dbe8b90f846d301dd55806f3c66006a950d3d382b4422e0e99ab66e8499. The SHA-256 of every file is listed in RN03_deposit_annex.md.