What are some examples of scarce resources?
Mia Phillips
Updated on February 17, 2026
A scarce resource has infinite want and need but has finite recourses. Like you have said some of the biggest scarce resources are oil, gold, fresh water, and diamonds. But some other examples of scarce resources include trees (paper), land, jobs, and rare minerals.
What are 5 examples of scarce resources?
Examples of scarcity
- Land – a shortage of fertile land for populations to grow food.
- Water scarcity – Global warming and changing weather, has caused some parts of the world to become drier and rivers to dry up.
- Labour shortages.
- Health care shortages.
- Seasonal shortages.
- Fixed supply of roads.
How do you use scarce resources?
A simple scarce resource allocation decision involves the following steps:
- Calculate the contribution margin per unit of the scarce resource from each product.
- Rank the products in the order of decreasing contribution margin per unit of scarce resource.
- Estimate the number of units of each product which can be sold.
What are 3 resources that are scarce?
The six natural resources most drained by our 7 billion people
- Water. Freshwater only makes 2.5% of the total volume of the world’s water, which is about 35 million km3.
- Oil. The fear of reaching peak oil continues to haunt the oil industry.
- Natural gas.
- Phosphorus.
- Coal.
- Rare earth elements.
How do you distribute scarce resources?
The methods used to allocate our scarce resources are: Market System, Brute Force, Queuing, Random Selection, Tradition, Equal Shares, Need, Planned Systems. is the system used by the U.S.A. to distribute the allocate scarce resources by letting the buyers and sellers choose what to put in the market.
How do we decide who gets scarce goods and resources?
The most widely used method for allocating scarce things, or resources, in a market economy like ours is the price system. The price of things is determined by supply and demand. Scarce products and services in our economy all have price tags. The people who can afford the price will get one if they choose.
What are the most scarce resources?
Do we have scarce resources?
The resources that we value—time, money, labor, tools, land, and raw materials—exist in limited supply. There are simply never enough resources to meet all our needs and desires. Because these resources are limited, so are the numbers of goods and services we can produce with them. …