Effects of heterogeneous ICT on critical metal supply: A differentiated perspective on primary and secondary supply

Abstract

How to ensure supply security of critical metals is a common challenge for China and even developed countries. With the rapid development of information and communication technology (ICT), its impacts on the supply of critical metal need to be discussed. Taking China as an example, this article studies the influences of heterogeneous ICT on primary and secondary supply of critical metals and explores their influencing mechanisms. The results show that: (1) In the primary supply, ICT has inverted U-shaped influences on the host metals, while the impacts on byproduct metals antimony and nickel are U-shaped and linear promotion respectively; ICT has linear promoting effects on secondary supply. (2) Compared with hardware and communication equipment, software products have the most obvious impact on both primary and secondary supply. (3) Industrial scale of mining (SM) and smelting (SS), energy structure (ES) and energy efficiency (EE) can enhance the impacts of ICT on the primary supply; while only SS enhances the impacts on the secondary supply. (4) In the primary supply of host metals, the improvement of EE and ES will shift the inflection point to the left due to crowding-out effect, while the opposite is true for SM.