Three billion people worldwide use solid fuels and inefficient stoves to meet their daily heating and cooking needs. The resulting household air pollution causes over four million deaths annually, and
Free technology distribution can be an effective development policy instrument if adoption is socially inefficient and hampered by affordability constraints. Yet, policy makers often oppose free distribution, arguing that reference dependence spoils the willingness to pay and thus market potentials in the long run. For improved cookstoves, this paper studies the willingness to pay six years after a randomized one-time free distribution.
The cost of providing electricity to the unconnected 1.1 billion people in developing countries is significant. High hopes are pinned on market-based dissemination of off-grid technologies to complement the expensive extension of public grid infrastructure. In this paper, we elicit the revealed willingness-to-pay for different off-grid solar technologies in a field experiment in rural Rwanda. Our findings show that households are willing to dedicate substantial parts of their budget to electricity, but not enough to reach cost-covering prices.
On 13 November, Thomas Sterner and his American colleagues published the article "Policy sequencing toward decarburization", in the prestigious journal Nature Energy . "This is a carefully nuanced…
this study uses a randomized experiment in rural Ethiopia to test on how quickly energy efficient technology (an improved stove) is put in use after the technologies is disseminated. We evaluate two concepts that may affect usage of a product: screening (related to valuation of a product) and sunk cost effects (based on the price the potential user paid for the product). A standard Tobit and IV-Tobit methods of estimations are used for testing sunk cost and screening effects, respectively.
Clean and reliable energy is a “golden thread” in sustainable development, according to experts who gathered at the EfD Policy Day Workshop in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on October 26, 2017. Kicking off…
Measuring inequality can be challenging due to the limitations of using household income or expenditure data. Because actual energy consumption can be measured more easily and accurately and is relatively more stable, it may be a better measure of inequality. Here we use data on energy consumption for specific devices from a large nation-wide household survey (n = 3,404 rural households from 12 provinces) to assess inequality in rural China.
Research Nucleus in Environmental and Natural Resource Economics at the University of Concepción is organizing the Fifth Workshop on Environmental and Natural Resource Economics, 5th and 6th October…
Energy is arguably one of the major challenges in developing countries. Much research has been done on energy production, consumption and access, however energy reliability has been given less focus.
