This report is an output of the technical assistance activity carried out over 2008-2010 to Alternative Energy Promotion Center (AEPC), which is the nodal renewable energy agency of Nepal. This study has been designed to establish a monitoring system for AEPC to continually measure the results...

Empirical insights on household behavior and electricity consumption patterns in this book reveal that, in Europe and Central Asia, the erosion of tariff based subsidies has disproportionately affected the poor, while direct transfers through social benefit systems have often been inadequately...

The Africa Infrastructure Country Diagnostic (AICD) has produced continent-wide analysis of many aspects of Africa's infrastructure challenge. The main findings were synthesized in a flagship report titled Africa's Infrastructure: a time for transformation, published in November 2009. Meant for...

Water and sanitation utilities in Africa operate in a high-cost environment. They also have a mandate to at least partially recover their costs of operations and maintenance (O&M). As a result, water tariffs are higher than in other regions of the world. The increasing block tariff (IBT) is the...

Household surveys have long been used to estimate poverty and inequality trends, as well as trends in education and health indicators, but they have not been used to the same extent to assess trends in the access to or coverage of modern infrastructure services. In this paper, we use Demographic...

A majority of sub-Saharan Africa s population is not connected to electricity and piped water networks, and even in urban areas coverage is low. Lack of network coverage may be due to demand or supply-side factors. Some households may live in areas where access to piped water and electricity is...

Access to energy, especially modern sources, is a key to any development initiative. Based on cross-section data from a 2004 survey of some 2,300 households in rural Bangladesh, this paper studies the welfare impacts of household energy use, including that of modern energy, and estimates the...

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 needed to perform such basic tasks as...

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....

This paper applies an econometric analysis to estimate the average and distribution benefits of rural electrification using rich household survey data from India. The results support that rural electrification helps to reduce time allocated to fuelwood collection by household members and...