Do you pay a fair price for electricity? Consumers’ satisfaction and utility reform in the EU

Carlo V. Fiorio () and Massimo Florio ()

Departemental Working Papers from Department of Economics University of Milan Italy

Abstract: The research question addressed by this paper is a simple one: are European consumers happy with the electricity supply services after two decades of reforms? We focus on self-assessed consumers’ satisfaction with electricity prices as reported in three waves of Eurobarometer survey, 2000-2002-2004, conditioning on some indicators of public ownership, vertical integration and entry regulation across the EU-15. Our results do not support a systematic association between consumers’ satisfaction and the complete reform package made of privatisation, vertical disintegration and liberalisation. These results, which have been extensively tested for robustness, raise various concerns about the way the reform processes have been undertaken and provides some warnings about possible effects on public support for public utility reforms.

Keywords: Consumers’ satisfaction; electricity; privatisation; vertical disintegration; liberalisation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L94 L95 L96 L50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-ind and nep-reg
Date: 2008-05-19

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.economia.unimi.it/uploads/wp/Deas2008_12wp.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mil:wpdepa:2008-12

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Departemental Working Papers from Department of Economics University of Milan Italy
Address: Via Conservatorio 7, I-20122 Milan - Italy
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Daniele Checchi ().