The Research Of Availability Of African Copper Resources In China

As an important non-ferrous metal resource, the supply of copper are directly related to the national economic security, modern industrial development and people’s quality of life. In recent years the copper resource is in great demand domestically, China has become the world’s largest copper consumer. However, our copper resource endowment is relatively poor and domestic copper supply is limited. It is difficult to meet the increasing consumption demand. Therefore, copper resources shortage has become the’bottleneck’which constrains the economic development of China. Meanwhile, Africa has relatively good copper resource endowment, plus the low degree of exploitation and China-Africa friendly cooperation. It is necessary for China to choose Africa as the copper resources supply to enhance the availability of copper resource.Taking the theory of factor endowments, trend prediction theory as the instructions, with the scenario analysis method and the balance analysis between supply and demand, this article is to analyse our country copper resource supply and demand situation and future trends. It is also using the integrated analysis to systematically investigate a series of factors which affect China’s availability of African copper resources. In this way, the level of availability of our country can be determined through this article. Moreover, this article is to further give countermeasures to improve the level in Africa copper resource availability for our country.The specific research contents are demonstrated in three aspects:The first part is to analyse the supply-demand situation of copper resource in our country. This part is initially introducing our country’s copper resource endowment, then giving an analysis about the current situation of China’s supply and demand of copper resources. On this basis, this article is to predict the copper resources supply and demand of our country in the future by using the scenario analysis and nonlinear regression analysis, and then the demand-supply situation of copper resources in the future will be given a basic judgement.The second part is to analyse the availability of African copper resources to our country. This section firstly introduces two aspects:import and investment,and then gives and analyse four main factors which affect the availability of African copper resources to our country:Africa, China, the relation between Africa and China, as well as international competition. Then, based on the systematically researched literature, this article is to evaluate these factors respectively and give a conclusion finally.The third part is to illustrate some suggestions to improve the availability of African copper resources. Based on the above analysis, this part is to propose some countermeasures to enhance the availability of Africa copper resource, to alleviate the contradiction between supply and demand of domestic copper resources. These measures include consolidating China-Africa friendly relations, stabilise import trade, strengthening the exploitation investment, etc.About the availability of mineral resources, our predecessors just focused on the study of mineral resource availability from domestic view. However, this paper, with a global perspective, is to study the availability of Africa copper resources in China. Thus, the new analysis perspective and the new research method should be determined, which in particular becomes the characteristics of this study.