Evaluation of Technological Changes’ Impact on Scarcity of Minerals by a Value Chain Approach: Introducing a Conceptual Model

Abstract

Adopting a policy and deciding on long-term investment in the mining industry by a government orprivate sector actors depends strongly on the ability to predict the scarcity of mineral reserves. Changein scarcity of mineral reserves is a function of several technological and non-technological factors.Among them, change in technology is the most significant factor affecting scarcity. This paper aims toinvestigate the relationship between mineral scarcity changes and technological changes. In this study,the effective factors on mineral scarcity were initially considered, and the main and most commonlyproposed approaches in the field of scarcity were briefly analysed. The problems associated with theseapproaches in explaining the relationship between scarcity and changes in technology are thendiscussed. These approaches are mainly limited to the past available data, whose direction is thedevelopment “from scarcity to technological changes”; therefore, they are inefficient in predictingscarcity due to technological changes. To overcome such limitations, a chain technology method wasintroduced with an approach moving “from technological changes to scarcity”. In this approach,scarcity is firstly explained based on the objective technological changes, and secondly it is related tosome technologies affecting scarcity, such as mineral exploration, exploitation, mineral processing,metal production, consumer goods and recycling of scrap metals. The results obtained from this papercan be effectively used to make decisions regarding investment in the mineral industry.

Keywords

• aggregate production function
• chain technology
• Investment
• scarcity index