| 1. |
- Tilton, John E., et al.
(författare)
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Public policy and future mineral supplies
- 2018
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Ingår i: Resources policy. - : Elsevier. - 0301-4207 .- 1873-7641. ; 57, s. 55-60
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- A widespread and pessimistic view of the availability of mineral commodities calls for strong government initiatives to ensure adequate future supplies. This article provides a more market oriented and optimistic perspective, one that focuses on production costs and prices rather than physical availability. It sees short-run shortages continuing to plague commodity markets in the future as in the past. Though painful while they last, these shortages are temporary and do not pose a serious long-run threat to human welfare. Moreover, even without government intervention, they self-correct. The sharply higher prices that they evoke create strong incentives that foster supply and curb demand.Potentially more serious are long-run shortages due to mineral depletion. Such shortages are often thought to be inevitable, a conclusion that flows directly from the physical view of depletion. For various reasons, we reject this view of depletion in favor of an economic view. The latter recognizes that depletion may create long-run shortages, but stresses that this need not be the case if new technology can continue to offset the cost-increasing effects of depletion in the future as it has in the past. The economic view also suggests that a list of mineral commodities most threatened by depletion can best be compiled using cumulative availability curves rather than the more common practice of calculating commodity life expectancies based on estimates of available stocks.
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| 2. |
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| 3. |
- Radetzki, Marian, et al.
(författare)
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The boom in mineral markets : how long might it last?
- 2008
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Ingår i: Resources policy. - : Elsevier BV. - 0301-4207 .- 1873-7641. ; 33:3, s. 125-128
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The commodity price boom that emerged in 2004 has proved far more persevering than its predecessors of 1950 and 1973. Some analysts have suggested that it may represent the start of a "supercycle" caused by the voracious raw materials demand from China and other emerging economies, with prices remaining high for 20-30 years. We offer an alternative explanation. For a variety of reasons, the establishment of new capacity in minerals and energy to match the accelerated demand trends is more time consuming than commonly assumed, and may take a decade or longer. As soon as the new capacity is in place, however, the boom will be punctuated. Prices may collapse much earlier in the event of a severe recession that cuts the growth in commodity demand.
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| 4. |
- Svedberg, Peter, et al.
(författare)
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Long-term trends in the Real real prices of primary commodities : Inflation bias and the Prebisch-Singer hypothesis
- 2011
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Ingår i: Resources policy. - : Elsevier BV. - 0301-4207 .- 1873-7641. ; 36:1, s. 91-93
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In his recent article on measuring the long-term trends in the real prices of primary commodities, Cuddington (2010) extends in several important respects our earlier efforts (Svedberg and Tilton, 2006) to correct real commodity price trends for biases in the Consumer Price Index and other deflators. First, he argues for a log-linear relationship between prices and time. Second, he proposes a simple and quick method for obtaining corrected price trends from the published but uncorrected estimates. Finally, he illustrates, for the case of copper and presumably for many other commodities as well, the difficulties of obtaining real price trends significantly different from zero when the log values of the price data contain a unit root, requiring the use of difference stationary models. We welcome these insights, which should improve and make easier efforts to estimate correctly real commodity price trends over the long run. We would stress, however, that it is still important to correct for the biases in inflation indices, notwithstanding the failure of difference stationary models to obtain long-run real price trends (both corrected and uncorrected) significantly different from zero.
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| 5. |
- Svedberg, Peter, et al.
(författare)
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The Real, Real Price of Nonrenewable Resources : Copper 1870-2000
- 2003
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Over the past 40 years economists have devoted considerable effort to estimating long-run trends in real commodity prices. The results indicate that the real prices for many commodities have fallen, suggesting to the surprise of many that resource scarcity is declining over time. Almost all of this work, however, uses the U.S. producer price index or other standard price deflators, which recent research shows overestimate inflation for several reasons. This article examines copper prices with adjusted deflators designed to eliminate this bias. It finds that the trend over time, which is significantly downward when no adjustment is made to the deflator, displays no tendency in either direction or is significantly upward depending on the magnitude of the deflator adjustment employed. These findings suggest that real resources prices provide less support than widely assumed for the hypothesis that resources are becoming more available or less scarce over time.
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| 6. |
- Söderholm, Patrik, et al.
(författare)
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Material efficiency : an economic perspective
- 2012
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Ingår i: Resources, Conservation and Recycling. - : Elsevier BV. - 0921-3449 .- 1879-0658. ; 61:2, s. 75-82
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article presents an economic perspective of material efficiency, and discusses the role of public policy in providing market incentives for a more efficient use of materials. In doing so, it comments on the engineering approach to material efficiency presented by Allwood et al. (2011) in an earlier issue of Resources, Conservation and Recycling. We argue that concerns over potential future natural resource scarcities do not represent a strong motive for introducing policies to foster greater material efficiency but that various environmental externalities and information failures in the relevant material markets do. Moreover, in such instances policy makers should opt for policy measures that target the relevant market failures (e.g., environmental damages) as closely as possible. This normally means avoiding policies that directly encourage specific material efficiency options. Policy measures that address particular environmental problems and information externalities will enhance material efficiency in a more effective manner. This is because ex ante it is difficult for policy makers to know in what ways and by how much to alter material production and use.
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| 7. |
- Tilton, John E., et al.
(författare)
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Investor demand and spot commodity prices
- 2011
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Ingår i: Resources policy. - : Elsevier BV. - 0301-4207 .- 1873-7641. ; 36:3, s. 187-195
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The on-going debate over the influence of investor demand on spot commodity prices largely attempts to assess this influence by measuring the growth in investor demand in recent years. Given the serious data problems that plague such analyses, this article pursues another approach in the hope of providing useful insights into the impact of investor demand on spot commodity prices. It focuses on the mechanisms by which investor demand affects spot prices, and in particular on two questions. First, how does an increase in investor demand on the futures markets affect the spot market and spot price? Second, when investor demand is increasing and pushing a commodity's price up, do physical stocks of the commodity also have to be rising, as economists and others widely assume? On the first question, the article concludes that a surge in investor demand raising prices on the futures markets will have a direct and comparable effect on the spot market prices when these markets are in strong contango. However, when markets are in weak contango or backwardation, price movements in the futures markets have a much looser effect on spot prices. As a result, changes in investor demand on the futures markets may have little or no influence on spot prices in the absence of a strong contango. Instead, changes in fundamentals (that is, producer supply and consumer demand) and possibly changes in investor demand taking place directly on the spot market largely determine the spot price at such times. On the second question, the article shows that investor demand can be pushing up a commodity's price even when investor stocks are falling, despite the widespread presumption to the contrary.
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| 8. |
- Tilton, John E., et al.
(författare)
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Investor demand and spot commodity prices: Reply
- 2012
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Ingår i: Resources policy. - : Elsevier BV. - 0301-4207 .- 1873-7641. ; 37:3, s. 397-399
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Tidskriftsartikel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In a recent article (Tilton et al., 2011), we argue that even when investor stocks are declining an increase in investor demand can cause a commodity's price to rise, a conclusion that is both contrary to conventional wisdom and counter-intuitive. In his comment on our article, Olle Östensson (2011) challenges this finding. After assessing his concerns in this reply, we maintain that our original finding is valid: investor demand can be driving commodity prices higher even when investor stocks are falling.
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