Water, Electricity, and the Poor : Who Benefits from Utility Subsidies?
By Kristin Komives, Vivien Foster, J. Halpern, Q. Wodon, Roohi Abdullah. 2005
297 citations recorded by the source corpus.
While consumer utility subsidies are widespread in both the water and electricity sectors, their effectiveness in reaching and distributing resources to the poor is the subject of much debate. This publication brings together empirical evidence on subsidy performance across a wide range of countries. It documents the prevalence of consumer subsidies, provides a typology of the many variants found in the developing world, and presents a number of indicators useful in assessing the degree to which such subsidies benefit the poor, focusing on three key concepts: beneficiary incidence, benefit incidence, and materiality. The findings on subsidy performance will be useful to policy makers, utility regulators, and sector practitioners who are contemplating introducing, eliminating, or modifying utility subsidies, and to those who view consumer utility subsidies as a social protection instrument.
Subfields: Water Science and Technology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/73cf08f4c588a444e9a9b722fbf0f58f87503423
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- N. Estupiñán
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Citations in the corpus
- Infrastructure Quality and the Subsidy Trap (2015, background): “Komives et al. (2005) review the targeting performance of water and electricity subsidy schemes in many developing countries.”
- Affordability and Subsidies in Public Urban Transport: What Do We Mean, What Can Be Done? (2008, methodology): “This paper presents an approach consistent with the income distribution literature, and already applied to utility subsidies by Komives et al. (2005), among others.”