Abstract: Based on the driving forces of metal mineral exploration, metal consumption and price, this paper analyzes the changes and trend of input and output of metal mineral exploration in the world and China.The growth rate of global metal mineral consumption slowed obviously since 2012, but is evidently higher than that in the 1990s of 20th century.The consumption of metal minerals transited from the phase of rapid growth to the phase of stable growth.After sharply falling year after year, metal prices rebounded and then fluctuate at a middle level or middle-high level.During the years from 1990 to 2017, the expenditure of global metal mineral exploration experienced fluctuating at low level, rapidly rising, sharply falling, and then rebounding.As exploration difficulty increases, exploration depth rises and average grade declines, major discoveries and newly-added reserve decreased on the whole for global metal mineral exploration.It implies that the effectiveness of metal mineral exploration got lowered slowing in the past 27 years.It can be concluded from the trends of metal consumption and prices that the driving forces of rebounding continually for global metal mineral exploration will be not enough, and the expenditure of global metal mineral exploration will fluctuate at the middle level.Recent years, the expenditure of metal mineral exploration in China deviated the rebounding trend and the contribution to the world declined year by year.Compared with the proportion of metal consumption and extraction in China to the globe, the proportion of metal mineral exploration expenditure in China to the globe is much lower.It can be expected that the metal mineral exploration expenditure will rebound and then fluctuate at a middle level similar to the globe in the future years.