On resource depletion and productivity: The case of the Chilean copper industry

Marcelo Villena and Fernando Greve

Resources Policy, 2018, vol. 59, issue C, 553-562

Abstract: How resource depletion affects productivity is a crucial question for several industries. In fact, several natural resource-exporting countries have seen their productivity levels affected by resource depletion. Nevertheless, usually, it is not clear what the real productivity growth is, without discarding the effects of resource depletion in the production structure. The main aim of the paper is to empirically answer a relevant issue regarding the Chilean copper mining industry, which is, the slowdown of its productivity in the last decade, considering in the analysis the role of resource depletion. In particular, we consider resource depletion to be an exogenous and unpaid force that opposes technological change and hence increases costs through time, capturing in this way some stylized facts of, for example, the mining and fishing industries. The decomposition framework was applied to the Chilean copper mining industry, one of the most important in the world, using data from the period of 1985–2015. The econometric results were robust and pointed to the fact that the productivity fell sharply during the period; however, it did not fall as much as the traditional estimation methods pointed out. Our model showed that as much as 15% of this decline was due to the increase of the resource depletion variable (copper ore grade).

Keywords: Resource depletion; Technological change; Mining; Copper; Chile (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D24 L72 O3 Q30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142071830014X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jrpoli:v:59:y:2018:i:c:p:553-562

DOI: 10.1016/j.resourpol.2018.10.001

Access Statistics for this article

Resources Policy is currently edited by R. G. Eggert

More articles in Resources Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().