The war in Ukraine has brought the challenges stemming from Europe’s dependency on natural gas and oil imports into sharp focus. This has also highlighted another dependency - that on raw materials that are critical for the EU’s transition to a low-carbon economy. A strategic approach to raw...

Bergbau, soziale Konflikte und Umweltkatastrophen - seit den 1990er Jahren erlebt Lateinamerika einen historischen Rohstoffboom. Welche Rolle spielen die Betreiber der Minen in den Abbauregionen? Wie schaffen sie Akzeptanz unter der lokalen Bevölkerung? Und welche politischen Auswirkungen zieht...

Over 90 percent of Germany’s raw materials supply is imported and many of these imports come from only a small handful of producer countries. Often, these producer countries tend to be less democratic. In this respect, supply risks are extremely high in some cases, including for mineral raw...

In this working paper, we explore these questions based on analysis of a dataset of mining and mineral exploration projects covering all the major commodities or commodity groups in six Arctic countries or territories - Canada, Greenland, Finland, Sweden, Norway and Alaska. We do so through an...

Like copper, corn, or crude oil, companies increasingly trade like commodities. Some investors — certain holders of debt, activist shareholders, and controlling shareholders, especially private equity funds — are focused solely on returns. In practice, this means that they care about the...

The Entrepreneurship in the Raw Materials Sector proceeding is a collection of papers focusing on the macroeconomic aspects of green growth, the business opportunities in the raw materials sector, and the challenges in entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship training. These papers were presented...

Als Basisrohstoff für die Produktion etwa von Mikrochips, Solarzellen oder auch Batterien für Elektrofahrzeuge wird Silizium immer zentraler für zahlreiche Schlüsseltechnologien. Zwar ist das Grundmaterial Quarzsand weltweit fast unbegrenzt vorhanden. Jedoch wird Silizium regional hoch...

Raw material criticality has played an important role in geostrategic thinking, especially since the crisis surrounding the price and supply of rare earths at the beginning of the 2010s. However, once dependency and strategic importance grow too strong, substitution efforts will take place that...

This study analyzes the relationships and dynamics between material production, foreign direct investment (FDI), economic activity, carbon productivity, the stock market, and green tech, both in a global and European context, using panel vector autoregressive methodology (PVAR). The empirical...

On March 13, 2012, Japan, the United States, and the European Union filed Requests for Consultations (Requests) with the World Trade Organization (WTO), contesting China's export restrictions on rare earth elements (REE). The Requests were long expected, given the growing importance of REE,...

This paper re-examines empirical exchange rate puzzles by focusing on three OECD economies (Australia, Canada, and New Zealand) where primary commodities constitute a significant share of their exports. For Australia and New Zealand especially, we find that the U.S. dollar price of their...

We examine how globalization affects trade patterns and welfare when conflict prevails domestically. We do so in a simple model of trade, in which a natural resource like oil is contested by competing groups using real resources ("guns"). Thus, conflict is viewed as ultimately stemming from...

We gather extensive global price and volume information to establish that exhaustible mineral commodities are both affordable and abundant. On average, we extract a kilogram of mineral for every 5$ of GDP, at a cost of 1⁄4$. We predict that economic growth will progressively decouple from...

"This collection takes a multi-perspective approach in the study of empire and commodities beyond temporal and spatial boundaries. From early modern Venetian trade to tea in the Eurasian world, the role of gold in Portuguese imperial ambitions and British sailors as traders, Across Colonial...

Der Ausbau erneuerbarer Energien und Effizienzgewinne, die durch die Energiewende induziert werden, bringen einen verringerten Einsatz fossiler Brenn- und Kraftstoffe mit sich, die in Deutschland überwiegend importiert werden. Während die erneuerbaren Energien anhand der installierten Leistung...

Natural resources are often related to conflicts. The Dal B'o & Dal B'o (2011) theory states that income shocks affect capital- and labor-intensive sectors differently. Using sub-national cells covering the African continent for 1997-2010, I find that conflicts react differently to positive...

The emergence of a mass market for electric vehicles (EVs) offers considerable development opportunities for resource exporters, given their intensive raw material requirements, including for cobalt, nickel, lithium, copper, aluminium, and manganese. To exploit the benefits of new demand,...

The paper reviews the debate about transparency in extractive industry commodities trade. It examines the obstacles to improved transparency. A critical review of the experience with estimating losses from a lack of transparency concludes that many of the published estimates of losses from...

El objetivo del estudio es analizar las tendencias entre 1970 y 2017 en la balanza comercial física, el uso y eficiencia de materiales de América Latina y el Caribe. La metodología es la contabilidad de los flujos de materiales que compila las entradas de materiales (biomasa, combustibles...