Concentration in the Electricity Market : A Return to the Old Paradigm?

The paper evaluates the efficiency of the Business Groups that make up the Brazilian electricity distribution segment. To this end, three models were developed to evaluate global, technical, and scale efficiency. On average, the groups obtained the value of 0.60 for global efficiency, 0.76 for technical efficiency, and 0.80 for scale efficiency. Under the technical efficiency frontier, approximately 24% of operating costs could be reduced, translating into an average drop in the tariff of R$ 65 in the year 2017. This study contributes, in an empirical manner, to a greater understanding of the phenomenon of market concentration in natural monopolies