The EV Revolution: Critical Material Supply Chains, Trade, and Development

Benjamin Jones, Viet Nguyen-Tien and Robert Elliott ()
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Benjamin Jones: University College London

Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, University of Birmingham

Abstract: The emergence of a mass market for Electric vehicles (EVs) offers considerable development opportunities for countries that have abundant resources of cobalt, nickel, lithium, copper, aluminium, and manganese. Not surprisingly, developing countries have proposed ambitious plans to expand their domestic EV raw material sectors. However, because of the complexity, opacity, and volatility in these industries it is important that the implications of the changing demand for the critical materials needed by the EV global value chain and carefully understood. One observation from the resource curse literature is that countries need to strengthen their institutions if they are to mitigate the risk of poorly directed, often excessively procyclical, investment. In this paper we draw on results from the CoMIT model (Jones et al. 2020) to help analyse the outlook for EV demand and associated raw material usage paying particular attention to the key drivers and sensitivities required to track future market transformations. We assess key fiscal, regulatory, environmental, and institution reform priorities and the market barriers that may prevent successful domestic resource mobilisation in these resource chains.

Keywords: Electric vehicle; global value chains; critical materials; resource mobilization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F63 F64 L61 L62 O10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44 pages
Date: 2021-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene and nep-tre
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