This chapter focuses on metals as they provide the clearest example of the challenges and opportunities that mineral resources present to society, in terms of both primary production and recycling. Basic concepts, information requirements and sources of consumer and industrial resource demand...

We develop the absorbing Markov chain (AMC) for describing in detail the network of paths through an industrial system taken by an embodied resource from extraction through intermediate products and finally consumer products.  We refer to this as a resource-specific network. This work builds on...

We develop the rectangular choice-of-technology model with factor constraints, or RCOT, for analysis of the economy of a single region, or of multiple regions in the context of a model of the world economy. RCOT allows for one or more sectors to operate more than one technology simultaneously,...

This paper identifies a fundamental challenge in the development of input-output databases of the world economy intended for analysis of alternative scenarios with a model of the world economy. Primary data sources for individual economies generally do not use the same sectoral classification...