ABSTRACT
The widely publicized predictions of impending scarcity and even exhaustion of extractive natural resources such as metals and fuels, in the Club of Rome study The Limits to Growth, and the less widely publicized rebuttals (see, for example, Beckerman [1], Nordhaus [2], and Kay and Mirrlees [3]) suggest that a careful analysis of what is meant by resource scarcity, and of how it is measured or indicated, might be worthwhile. This paper is intended to provide such an analysis. Specifically, in this section I consider the meaning of scarcity, and in subsequent sections a number of proposed measures, their properties, and their behavior as a resource stock is depleted or augmented over time.
