Do power sector reforms affect electricity prices in selected Asian countries?

Tauqir Ahmed () and Arshad Bhatti

Energy Policy, 2019, vol. 129, issue C, 1253-1260

Abstract: This paper examines the impact of power sector reforms on electricity prices using panel data for selected Asian countries over the period 1970–2017. We estimate two separate models for domestic and industrial prices. Our results from pooled OLS and the random effect model show that the impact of independent power producers, privatisation, restructuring, and deregulation on electricity prices is negative and significant, making both domestic and industrial consumers better off. However, the welfare effects of unbundling generation from transmission and distribution appear to be beneficial for residential end-users only. Our results also indicate that other reform indicators including third-party access and the existence of independent regulatory agencies may not be the right choice for a reduction in electricity prices, given the absence of a requisite conducive environment for regulations in our sample countries. Thus, the inconsistent behaviour of different regulatory reforms towards different countries and regions of the world needs to be considered in the policy formulation of the power sector. We also note that the results can be magnified in terms of significance with the exclusion of some outlier observations in the data.

Keywords: Electricity reforms; Electricity prices; Panel data analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D60 E31 I30 L94 L97 L98 N75 Q40 Q48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421519301752
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:enepol:v:129:y:2019:i:c:p:1253-1260

DOI: 10.1016/j.enpol.2019.03.012

Access Statistics for this article

Energy Policy is currently edited by N. France

More articles in Energy Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().