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Gold/Mining/Energy : Gold and Silver Juniors, Mid-tiers and Producers -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (16785)	7/23/2006 12:44:52 AM
From: koan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 78410

I just heard china is building a new coal fired untility power plant every week for the next five years!

To: koan who wrote (16785)	7/23/2006 2:59:02 AM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 78410

Heavy reading for the koanhed. There will be questions later. www-econ.stanford.edu Prior to the 1960s, Australians accepted any number of unscientific rationalizations for the absence of important minerals such as petroleum: oil could not be found south of the equator; Australia’s rocks were too old to contain oil; the country had been so thoroughly scoured by prospectors that surely nothing valuable could remain to be found. But this very attitude could lead to lethargic and therefore self-confirming search behaviors. Geologist Harry Evans recalled his own classic “rational expectations” reaction when a search party from the Weipa mission on the Cape York Peninsula found extensive outbreaks of bauxite in 1955: “As the journey down the coast revealed miles of bauxite cliffs, I kept thinking that, if all this is bauxite, then there must be something the matter with it; otherwise it would have been discovered and appreciated long ago.” Indeed there was nothing wrong with it: by 1964 Weipa held about one-quarter of the known potential bauxite in the world (Blainey 1993, p. 332). The operational question is not whether countries should attempt to reinvent themselves as entirely different historical and geographic entities than they are in actuality – such things are not matters of choice. The practical policy issue is whether countries with resource potential should encourage investment, exploration, and research for the purpose of developing that potential to its maximum. Even skeptics about resource-based development concede that policies to restrict exports in order to "conserve" nonrenewable resources have had disastrous consequences (Auty and Mikesell 1998, p. 47). But such writers continue to base their analysis on the erroneous assumption that "natural resources, in contrast to assets produced by capital and labor, represent an endowment to society" ( ibid., p. 45); or that natural resource industries, In reality, so-called "natural" resources require extensive investments before they are valuable – perhaps more so today than in the past – and the required investments include not just physical capital and transportation, but also the acquisition of knowledge about the resource base and the development of technologies that increase the value of that resource base. The fact that "information" can be disseminated costlessly and instantaneously around the world by no means implies that location-specific knowledge is no longer valuable. If anything, the opposite is true. Because extending the "knowledge frontier" can extend a country’s effective resource base, it is entirely possible for resource sectors to lead an economy’s growth for extended periods of time.