Electricity sector reform in developing countries : a survey of empirical evidence on determinants and performance

By Tooraj Jamasb, Raffaella L. Mota, David M Newbery, Michael Pollitt. 2005

193 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Driven by ideology, economic reasoning, and early success stories, vast amounts of financial resources and effort have been spent on reforming infrastructure industries in developing countries. It is therefore important to examine whether evidence supports the logic of reforms. The authors review the empirical evidence on electricity reform in developing countries. They find that country institutions and sector governance play an important role in the success and failure of reform. And reforms also appear to have increased operating efficiency and expanded access to urban customers. However, the reforms have to a lesser degree passed on efficiency gains to customers, tackled distributional effects, and improved rural access. Moreover, some of the literature is not methodologically robust and on par with general development economics literature. Further, findings on some issues are limited and inconclusive, while other important areas are yet to be addressed. Until we know more, implementation of reforms will be more based on ideology and economic theory rather than solid economic evidence.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/18ef798e33b47d795f031ad9a037a45be4f11a50

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Citations in the corpus

Electricity Market Reform in the European Union: Review of Progress toward Liberalization &Integration* (2005, background): “Key words: Electricity, energy, liberalisation, regulation, integration, European Union JEL Classification: L11, L22, L 52, Q48 1”
The arguments for and against ownership unbundling of energy transmission networks (2008, background): “Some of the electricity studies are reviewed in the context of an assessment of general lessons in Jamasb et al. (2004).”
Evaluating the evidence on electricity reform: Lessons for the South East Europe (SEE) market (2009, unknown): “There have been a large number of studies looking at electricity reform in developing countries generally (see Jamasb et al., 2004).”