Economic importance assessment of rare minerals

As a key raw material of modern industry, especially strategic emerging industries, rare mineral resources play an increasingly important role in the modern national economy.Based upon the classification on 18 kinds of rare minerals, this paper avoids the market scale and price of rare minerals, the value-added chain method is used to evaluate the economic importance of rare mineral resources according to the final use of mineral resources and the added value of the corresponding departments, at the same time, resource substitution is included in the calculation of economic importance.The results show that the economic importance of germanium, zirconium, indium, beryllium, rare earth metals and cadmium ranked higher, followed by cobalt, graphite, tantalum and lithium, while niobium and rhenium ranked lower in 2016.