 Measuring willingness to pay for reliable electricity: Evidence from SenegalJoshua Deutschmann, Agnieszka Postepska and Leopold Sarr World Development, 2021, vol. 138, issue C Abstract: Low-quality electricity service constitutes a significant obstacle in achieving sustainable development. Governments in low-income countries and donors are increasingly seeking to invest in improving electricity service quality and reliability. Understanding households’ and firms’ willingness to pay (WTP) for quality improvements is key to designing investments in the electricity sector. In this paper, we provide new evidence on WTP for service quality improvements from a nationally-representative survey in Senegal. We find that households and firms are willing to pay a premium over current tariffs for high-quality electricity service without outages. However, WTP for marginal service improvements is significantly lower than WTP for uninterrupted service, suggesting that, for households and firms, any increase in electricity tariff must be accompanied by substantial quality improvements. We discuss the multi-round bidding game built in our data to emphasize the importance of design choices in eliciting the WTP and draw some policy implications. Keywords: Willingness to pay; Contingent valuation; DCm; Unique valuation assumption (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:138:y:2021:i:c:s0305750x20303363 DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2020.105209 Access Statistics for this article World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes More articles in World Development from Elsevier |
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