The economically developed Western countries play a major role in the production of chrome ores, lead, zinc, molybdenum, gold, phosphate ores and potash, developing countries in the production of bauxite, copper, tin, silver, and former socialist and socialist countries in the production of iron and manganese ores and tungsten. In the case of tin, tungsten, and potassium salts, there are sharp contrasts between the three groups of countries. Conversely, in the production of iron, manganese, chrome, phosphorus, and nickel ores, the differences between them are not so great.
Although some authors have attempted to make a mining regionalization of the world, there is no generally accepted scheme for such a regionalization. However, with some conventionality, nine mining regions can be distinguished:
1) USA, Canada and Mexico;
2) Latin America
3) Western Europe
4) CIS countries;
5) China;
6) North Africa and Southwest Asia;
7) Sub-Saharan Africa;
8) SOUTH AFRICA;
9) Australia.
In all these regions, more than 8,000 deposits of mining and mining-chemical raw materials (without fuel) are currently being developed, including almost 1,200 large ones (including 330 in North America, 215 in Africa, 200 in Latin America, 150 in Western Europe, and 120 in Australia). The first and fourth regions have the largest reserves of mineral fuels and raw materials. As for the development over the next 10-15 years, the most optimistic outlook is for the first, second, sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth regions.
There are eight major mining countries in the world that primarily determine the main production capacities in this important sector of the global economy. These are China, Australia, the United States, Canada, Brazil, South Africa, and India. For these countries, the mining industry has long been one of the areas of international specialization, and it is multisectoral in nature. The second group of countries in terms of mining industry development includes Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Poland, Indonesia, Venezuela, Peru, and Mexico. It can be added that there are many more countries, especially developing ones, that do not have a diversified mining industry, but stand out on the world market by the level of development of one of its subsectors. These are, for example, Chile for copper production, Guinea and Jamaica for bauxite mining, Morocco for phosphate ores, etc.
In general, the extraction of ore raw materials is more widespread than that of nonore raw materials, but there are considerable differences between its individual subsectors. For example, copper ores are currently mined in 50 countries, iron ores in 43, bauxite in 30, tin and tungsten ores in 25, nickel ores in 22, cobalt ores in 15, and molybdenum ores in 12. And this is not to mention the huge differences between them in “weight categories”.