Experimental Evidence on the Economics of Rural Electrification

By Kenneth Lee, Edward Miguel, Catherine D. Wolfram. Journal of Political Economy, 2020

204 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present results from an experiment that randomized the expansion of electric grid infrastructure in rural Kenya. Electricity distribution is a canonical example of a natural monopoly. Experimental variation in the number of connections, combined with administrative cost data, reveals considerable scale economies, as hypothesized. Randomized price offers indicate that demand for connections falls sharply with price. Among newly connected households, average electricity consumption is very low, implying low consumer surplus. We do not find meaningful medium-run impacts on economic and noneconomic outcomes. We discuss implications for current efforts to increase rural electrification in Kenya and highlight how various factors may affect interpretation.

Subfields: Business and International Management, Pollution, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/deca607b0a8391b979d3d929aa311ba2b5ed9748

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In Pollution

1. Maximiliane Sievert
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1. Maximiliane Sievert
2. Jörg Peters

Citations in the corpus

• Rural electrification through mini-grids: Challenges ahead (2019, background): “Introduction A set of recent evaluation studies has cast doubt on the transformative effect that on grid rural electrification could have on economic development in many parts of rural Africa, at least under prevailing circumstances (Chaplin et al. 2017; Lee et al. 2018; Lenz et al. 2017).”