ABSTRACT
The most important concern economies of scale, access to technical and marketing knowledge, the structure of capital and personnel markets, and the international trade regime. The history and structure of most resource-based industries is influenced by three main factors: location and nature of the raw material deposits; location and nature of market demand for the resource-based product; and technology. The world copper industry has a number of interesting features. Firstly, it is widely believed that, as for many years in the case of oil, the North American market is segmented off from that in the rest of the noncommunist world. Secondly, in the main consuming countries, a substantial share of market demand is satisfied by ‘secondary’ metal, produced from scrap, generally by a large number of fairly small firms. Lead is easily saleable in any industrialized country and marketing would not be a major problem for a new less developed countries producer.
