The Relationship Between Prices of Various Metals, Oil and Scarcity

Abstract

No consensus has been reached on the problem of solving resource depletion. A recognition of the fact that resources are not endless and the Earth is a finite globe reinforces the idea that the vision of continuous economic growth is not sustainable over time. The aim of this paper is to examine the efficacy of real prices as an indicator of metals and oil in consideration of growth tendencies in the Consumer Price Indexes. In addition, enhancing the current literature on commodity price interrelationships, the main contribution of this study is the substitution of different proxies in order to justify the effect of scarcity and crude oil changes on the examined metal group prices. In order to demonstrate the usefulness of scarcity as an indicator of real price deviations, the study has been conducted involving various non-renewable metals, i.e., copper, molybdenum, zinc, gold and platinum group metals. The real price indices and metal prices of the US market are constructed between 1913 and 2015. Moreover, additional econometric analyses are also carried out to discover whether prices of various metals associate with oil prices and scarcity, as the proxy of reserves-to-production ratio. The linear regression results seem to suggest that the effects of the R/P ratios are negatively correlated with each of the examined precious (gold, PGMs), mass consumable (copper, zinc) and doping agent (molybdenum) metals from 1991 to 2015. An increase in oil-prices is positively associated with the price levels of each non-renewable resource in the short-run. The findings of multivariate co-integration and Granger causality tests also suggest that pairwise and direct relationships among these variables seem to arise in the long-run. These findings indicate essential questions that must be addressed by future generations in order to appropriately solve scarcity problems.