Global export flow of Chilean copper: The role of environmental innovation and renewable energy transition

Abstract

Copper is one of the most important minerals that has extensive use in environment-friendly technologies and renewable energy generation. The global urgency for environmental and ecological conservation through renewable energy transition has considerably enhanced the importance of copper and articles thereof. Chile is a major producer of copper. It contributes more than one-third to global supply. Therefore, this study explores the export flow of Chilean copper in response to increasing demand side conditions in major 24 trading partners from 2002 to 2020. This objective is realized by constructing an augmented model for import demand that incorporates bilateral real exchange rate along with real GDP, environmental innovation, and renewable energy transition in major import markets. The estimated results of panel quantiles via moments techniques reveal a significant positive impact with increasing coefficients at higher quantiles, while environmental innovation and renewable energy transition in trading partners show significant positive impact with decreasing values of coefficients at higher quantiles. The findings urge Chile to enhance production capacity of copper and other critical mineral and improve participation in global value chain to meet sharply increasing copper demand from environmental innovation and renewable energy transition.

Keywords

Copper / Export flow / Renewable energy / Environmental innovation / Panel data / Quantiles via moments

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Rahul Nag: Conceptualization, Validation, Investigation, Data Curation, Writing – Original Draft, Writing – Review & Editing, Visualization. H. Hrushikesh: Formal analysis, Investigation, Writing – Review & Editing. Nathan Cogné: Formal analysis, Investigation, Writing – Review & Editing. N. Prabhakar: Resources, Writing – Review & Editing, Supervision, Project administration.

Acknowledgements

This manuscript is a part of the doctoral research work of Rahul Nag at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. Rahul’s research work is supported by the Prime Minister’s Research Fellows (PMRF) scheme from the Ministry of Education, New Delhi, Government of India (PMRF ID: 1300753). Fieldwork and laboratory studies were financially supported by the Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB, Govt. of India) core research grant (CRG/2019/000812) to N. Prabhakar. Mineral and monazite analyses were performed using the SERB-funded EPMA National Facility at the Department of Earth Sciences, IIT Bombay (IRPHA grant no. IR/S4/ESF-16/2009). Prabhakar acknowledges the core research grant (file no. CRG/2019/000812) for the financial support given for laboratory analysis. Javed M. Shaikh is thanked for his help with EPMA analysis. We thank two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments that helped improved this manuscript. The Authors also acknowledge editorial handling of Prof. M. Santosh and Vinod Samuel.

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