An empirical investigation on the distributional impact of network charges in Germany

Lisa Schlesewsky and Simon Winter

No 4/2018, CIW Discussion Papers from University of Münster, Center for Interdisciplinary Economics (CIW)

Abstract: The increase in network costs within the German electricity grid, due to a rising share of renewable energy generation, has led to higher network charges in recent years. We use socioeconomic data in order to investigate distributional effects within the period 2010-2016, and employ three different inequality metrics - the Gini coefficient, the Theil index and the Atkinson index - all of which unambiguously indicate regressive effects of network charges. The three metrics show an increase of economic inequality of at least 0.6 % when accounting for network charges. This finding is due to 1. the relative inferiority of electricity, 2. the regressive impact of a fixed component of network charges, 3. considerable regional disparities, and 4. the higher prevalence of prosumers within high-income households.

Keywords: network charges; renewable energies; economic inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 Q40 Q42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-eur, nep-knm and nep-reg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/179922/1/1024412008.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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:ciwdps:42018

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CIW Discussion Papers from University of Münster, Center for Interdisciplinary Economics (CIW) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().