Heating is a critical issue for the livelihoods of Eastern Europe and Central Asia's people. The region's gold climate, the legacy of central planning, and the drop in household incomes over the past 10 years, influence profoundly the design of heating strategies for the urban poor. This paper...

Sub-Saharan Africa trails other regions in providing access to electricity for poor urban and rural residents. This poor performance can be linked to various factors, including political interference in utility policy, higher investment costs and lower profitability of extending service to rural...

India's huge expansion in rural electrification in the 1980s and 1990s offers lessons for other countries today. The paper examines the long-term effects of household electrification on consumption, labor supply, and schooling in rural India over 1982-99. It finds that household electrification...

Access to electricity is crucial for economic development and there is a growing body of literature on the impact of rural electrification on development. However, most studies have so far relied on cross-sectional surveys comparing households with and without electricity, which have well known...

Demand for energy (including electricity) has been increasing more rapidly in developing Asian economies than anywhere else in the world and is expected to continue growing. To meet rising demand, these countries must address such issues as how to meet the resulting enormous capital requirements...

What are linkages between rural infrastructure investments, and household welfare? In the past, most of the evaluations to assess the effectiveness of a project, focused on physical outputs, and success of project implementation. In recent years, more attention has been given to the impact of...

The existence of reliable, disaggregated information on residential fuel consumption and supply is essential to the formulation of sound household energy strategies. This report presents guidelines for designing and administering household energy surveys. The report is composed of four chapters....

One side of the debate about anti-dumping argues that dumping is not a problem in international trade - that it is a normal business practice which benefits the importing country's consumers and user industries - and that anti-dumping is inherently protectionist. The other side argues that an...

The authors examine the welfare effects of increasing household energy prices in Poland. Their main finding is that the policy of subsidizing household energy prices, common in the transition economies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, is regressive. Such programs do help the poor...