In the past two years, the proportion of China's investment in global mineral exploration has dropped. From 1991 to 2005, the share of China's mineral exploration in the global market fluctuated between 3% and 6%, accounting for an average of less than 4.5%. After 2006, China's mineral exploration investment in global share rapidly rising, reaching 19.3% by 2009. Although after that, although the global mineral exploration investment continued to decline after 2012, China's mineral exploration investment has a growing share of the world and will increase to 21.6% by 2015. Figure 5 shows that China surpassed the traditional mineral exploration nations such as Australia, Canada and the United States, triggering the past global mining exploration pattern dominated by Latin America, North America and Australia. With the continuous downturn in China's mineral exploration market, the proportion of investment in mineral exploration in China dropped to 19.0% in 2016. In 2017, investment in mineral exploration in China is expected to continue to decline, but the decline will be significantly narrowed, accounting for the global proportion will further decline. From 2009 to 2017, China's exploration investment accounted for an average of 17.5%, significantly higher than that of Canada, Australia and the United States. This shows that, while China has become a global consumption power of mineral resources, China has also become a global mineral exploration power driven by the supply and demand of mineral resources. It should be pointed out that in the downturn of the mining industry, a large part of the investment in mineral exploration in our country comes from the central and local government funds. And Canada, Australia and the United States have major differences in corporate investment. In 2016, the input of China's mineral exploration enterprises accounted for only 55.8% of the total investment. The investment by the central and local governments played an important role in stabilizing China's mineral exploration market.
China's mineral exploration inputs have weakened the global contribution
Considering that the data of SPG in our country are mainly from mining companies, the statistical channels are rather single, the statistics underestimate the actual investment in mineral exploration in our country, and the data of mineral exploration in China are revised with the data of mineral exploration in our country. In order to facilitate comparison, mineral resources surveyed by SPG were used to count the mineral exploration investment in China. At the same time, the input of mineral exploration from RMB to USD was converted into US dollars according to the National Bureau of Statistics.
In recent years, the input of mineral exploration in our country has basically kept pace with the global trend. From 1991 to 2017, the change of input in metal mineral exploration in China is different before 2003 compared with that of the world, Australia, Canada and the United States. However, after 2003-2005, the changes in investment in mineral exploration in our country are more and more consistent with the changes in global investment (Figure 4). This shows that the mineral exploration activities in our country are affected by the factors of social and economic development in our country. At the same time, the degree of economic development in the international community is more and more serious. The degree of integration of mineral exploration in our country and the world is deepening. The characteristics of China's mineral exploration investment in this change in time with China's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) has a great relationship. China formally joined the WTO in December 2001. In line with its promise of acceding to the WTO, China has expanded its opening up in various fields such as industry, agriculture and service industry year by year and fulfilled all its commitments in 2010 with more active and close economic ties between China and the rest of the world. Affected by the ever-deepening economic integration, the mutual influence between China and the rest of the world in mineral exploration has also become increasingly prominent. Especially after 2006, the input in mineral exploration in our country basically keeps pace with the global trend, though the volatility is much smoother than the global fluctuations. From 2013 to 2016, the annual global investment in mineral exploration dropped by 23.0% on average, while China's average annual decline was 14.4%.
