Comment

Abstract

Professor Chisholm’s analysis is easily summarised. After a brief discussion of the role of natural resources in the export base model and in Weberian location theory, he stresses that mineral resources — the main type of nonrenewable resource to which his paper is restricted — are likely to become exhausted within decades. The implications of this belief are that resource developments will increasingly take place at inhospitable locations. One consequence is higher capital costs. Another is the failure for such locations to generate long-term settlement, so that the natural resources then become the mobile factor and are transported to existing, and stable, population centres. Outside inhospitable areas, and especially at high-density locations, the major problem is the conflict between natural resource exploitation and environmental protection. Where extraction is for the world market an additional problem is how to convert resource revenues into local economic development.