表題番号:2019C-655 日付:2020/03/30
研究課題Bunching at Kink:Structural Price Elasticity of Nonlinear Electricity Price from Developing Country
研究者所属(当時) 資格 氏名
(代表者) 政治経済学術院 政治経済学部 助教 デンドゥップ ンガワン
研究成果概要

The market instruments are effective only if agents (commonly consumers) respond to the price. The market advocates have developed various pricing mechanisms and blocking pricing structures are commonly used price regimes to signal consumption decision, especially by electricity and water utility both in developing and developed countries. Market instruments are also becoming increasingly important instrument to tackle climate change and to achieve the target of 2°C of Paris Agreement. Therefore, understanding whether agents respond to such price regimes has become an important policy question than ever before. On the other hand, studies have also pointed out that households do not pay attention to what electricity price they are paying and their total consumption. Following the seminal work of (Saez, 2010), this study exploits mass around the threshold and infer the behavioral response (in terms of price elasticity) to nonlinear pricing and electricity subsidy, using census of monthly electricity consumption data from Bhutan. The results show that price elasticity of urban households is not significant for any of the sample periods. Similarly, for the pre subsidy rural sample, price elasticity is insignificant and elasticity is close to zero. On other hand, for all the post subsidy rural sample, elasticity is highly significant. However, the price elasticity is small and it ranges from 1.5% to 3.6%.