Lithium: Production and Estimated Consumption. Evidence of Persistence.

Abstract

Understanding the behavior of the lithium supply and the estimated consumption and flows is important for social and economic development. We focus on estimating persistence and for this purpose, we use techniques based on fractional integration. The empirical results provide evidence of mean reversion for the data corresponding to the global lithium production from 1925 to 2014 but not for U.S. lithium-related series such as production (1900 – 2008), estimated consumption (1900 – 2014), imports (1960 – 2015), and exports (1971 – 2015).