Mismeasured raw-material criticality, misdirected policy: a cross-country review of methods and impacts

Governments worldwide rely on “critical” raw materials lists to direct industrial policy, fiscal incentives, and trade strategy. However, the methodological soundness of these instruments remains underscrutinized. We assemble the first global database of critical, strategic or priority raw material lists and their policy uses, combining a large language model-based discovery pipeline across 206 jurisdictions with manual validation. Our analysis reveals a fragmented landscape, ranging from opaque qualitative judgments to indicator-based indices that lack empirical validation. Because these methodologies often rely on uncalibrated proxies rather than causal models, the resulting lists are diffuse, encompassing the majority of the periodic table rather than identifying genuine high-risk bottlenecks. This may lead to misallocation of public resources and strategic blindness to actual supply threats. We conclude that effective raw material governance requires explicitly defining optimization objectives and adopting empirically validated methods, such as probabilistic loss approaches, to identify relevant policies.