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...

Lack of access to electricity is one of the major impediments to growth and development of the rural economies in developing countries. That is why access to modern energy, in particular to electricity, has been one of the priority themes of the World Bank and other development organizations....

The Government of Montenegro is preparing an electricity tariff reform due to recent developments in the national and regional electricity markets. Electricity tariffs for residential consumers in Montenegro are likely to gradually increase by anywhere from 40 to over 100 percent. This...

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...

Household air pollution is the second leading cause of disease in Madagascar, where more than 99 percent of households rely on solid biomass, such as charcoal, wood, and crop waste, as the main cooking fuel. Only a limited number of studies have looked at the emissions and health consequences of...

Lighting is one of the determinants of quality of life. In most developing countries, households spend a considerable part of their cash income on modern fuels to meet their lighting needs. The average amount of fuel consumed for lighting is much higher in villages without electricity than in...

This paper provides an analytical discussion of several interconnected resource allocation problems from under-pricing of electricity used by farmers for groundwater extraction. In these situations, groundwater extraction is inefficiently high even without electricity under-pricing. Moreover,...

One of the contentious issues in electricity reform is whether there are significant gains from restructuring systems that are moderately well run. South Africa's electricity system is a case in point. The sector's state-owned utility, Eskom, has been generating some of the lowest-priced...

Energy poverty is a frequently used term among energy specialists, but unfortunately the concept is rather loosely defined. Several existing approaches measure energy poverty by defining an energy poverty line as the minimum quantity of physical energy neededto perform such basic tasks as...