This is the first academic paper that reviews the economic, policy, and technology history of shale gas development in the United States. The primary objective of the paper is to answer the question of what led to the shale gas boom in the United States to help inform stakeholders in those...

In this paper we develop a cost index–based measure of the expected consumer welfare gains from innovation in electricity generation technologies. To illustrate our approach, we estimate how much better off consumers would be from 2000 to 2020 as renewable energy technologies continue to be...

Governments investing in long-lead technology development programs face considerable uncertainty as to whether the investment eventually will “pay off” for the taxpayer. This paper offers a framework to inform long-lead technology investment. We extend the theory of quality-adjusted cost...

Income-based as well as most existing multidimensional poverty indices (MPI) assume equal distribution within the household and thus are likely to lead to yield a biased assessment of individual poverty, and poverty by age or gender. In this paper we first show that the direction of the bias...

Most existing empirical papers concerned about multidimensional poverty use the house- hold as the unit of analysis, meaning that multidimensional poverty status of the household is equated with the multidimensional poverty status of all individuals in the household. This assumption,...

In this paper, considering the overarching concern of the 2030 sustainable development agenda, "leaving no one behind", and targets 1.2 and 10.1 of the SDGs, we stress that the mainstream approach to multidimensional poverty measurement in developing countries faces some deficiencies to properly...

In response to global opportunities and domestic challenges, Ethiopia is revising its energy policy to switch from high-cost imported fossil fuel to domestically produced biofuels. Currently, there are biofuel investment activities in different parts of the country to produce ethanol and...

Electricity markets have typically been regulated all over the world. In Europe, UK and Norway have begun to deregulate their electricity markets. Several more countries will probably join them in the near future, for example Finland, Sweden and Spain. The objectives are twofold: to increase...

The welfare effects of introducing taxes on emissions of carbon dioxide is analysed within an empirical general equilibrium model of the Norwegian economy. A CO2 tax regime where we aim at stabilising the CO2 emissions at the 1990 emission level in 2020 is compared to a reference scenario...

Norway has abundant gas resources in the North Sea. The Norwegian gas production accounts for 2 percent of the world production and 17 percent of the European gas production. Despite huge gas production and resources, gas is not used for electricity generation in Norway. Excess capacity, cheap...