On Borrowed Time

Glossary

Artisanal mining: Mining on a very small scale using simple and unmechanized equipment. It often is illegal, and tends to be inefficient, dangerous, and highly polluting. See Chapter 6 and Box 6-3.

Availability: The sacrifice in terms of a representative basket of goods and services that must be forgone to obtain an additional unit of a commodity. When the basket of goods and services is growing, the commodity is becoming less available or more scarce. When one commodity requires a bigger basket than another, it is less available or more scarce. See Chapter 1.

Average cost: The total cost of production for a good divided by the number of units produced.

Cash costs: In the mining industry, cash costs are production costs minus capital ...