asset transformation and the challenges to servitize a utility business model abstract the traditional energy utility business model is under pressure and energy services are expected to play an important role for the energy transition experts and scholars argue that utilities need to innovate their business models and transform from commodity suppliers to service providers the transition from a product oriented capital intensive business model based on tangible assets towards a service oriented expense intensive business model based on intangible assets may present great managerial and organizational challenges little research exists about such transitions for capital intensive commodity providers and particularly energy utilities where the challenges to servitize are expected to be greatest this qualitative paper explores the barriers to servitization within selected swiss and german utility companies through a series of interviews with utility managers one of them is asset transformation the shift from tangible to intangible assets as major input factor for the value proposition which is proposed as a driver for the complexity of business model transitions managers need to carefully manage those challenges and find ways to operate both new service and established utility business models aside policy makers can support the transition of utilities through more favorable regulatory frameworks for energy services and by supporting the exchange of knowledge in the industry

on favoritism in auctions with entry abstract we examine the problem of endogenous entry in a single unit auction when the seller s welfare depends positively on the utility of a subset of potential bidders we show that unless the seller values those bidders welfare more than her own private utility a nondiscriminatory auction is optimal

equilibrium in auctions with entry the authors model entry incentives in auctions with risk neutral bidders and characterize a symmetric equilibrium in which the number of entrants is stochastic the presence of too many potential bidders raises coordination costs that detract from welfare the authors show that the seller and society can benefit from policies that reduce market thickness i e the relative abundance of buyers their analysis extends well known revenue equivalence and ranking theorems but also demonstrates that variations in the auction environment affect optimal policies e g reservation prices in ways not anticipated by models that ignore entry copyright 1994 by american economic association

on the competitiveness of grid tied residential photovoltaic generation systems in pakistan panacea or paradox abstract pakistan is experiencing a slow uptake of grid tied residential pv generation systems gtrpvgs despite of steep fall in pv module price higher solar irradiation and enactment of net metering by the government this slow uptake is attributed to the lack of awareness of four major stakeholders namely the house hold utility financier and the policy maker this paper presents a coherent framework that addresses the concerns of the stakeholders using four country specific parameters i e the local solar irradiation pv system costs borrowing and discount rates and electricity tariffs to compute npv irr payback period and levelized cost of electricity lcoe assuming net metering we model the economic payoffs on self consumption and sale of pv electricity at varying net metering rates system sizes load to generation profiles borrowing and discount rates findings suggest economic competitiveness of pv electricity with an irr and payback averaging around 28 and 5 years respectively moreover the lcoe is also found to be significantly lower than the retail rates the findings inform the household and financier on the economic yield utility on efficient tariff setting and government on sustainable policy design finally we argue that gtrpvgs bears huge potential for pakistan suffering from energy deficit unsustainable cost transmission losses and environmental hazards

persistent expected and innate poverty estimates for semi arid rural south india 1975 1984 this paper uses nine years of panel data on 170 rural households in southern india to calculate intertemporal measures of poverty these include measures of 1 expected poverty that identify households likely to remain poor on average during any year 2 innate poverty that identify households that are poor owning to deep rooted characteristics that cannot easily be changed in the short run and 3 persistent poverty that identify households whose incomes fall below a fixed poverty line over a number of years the poverty rates estimated for the sample with the three measures are 61 percent 48 percent and 22 percent respectively c 1993 academic press inc copyright 1993 by oxford university press

guaranteeing employment to the rural poor social functions and class interests in the employment guarantee scheme in western india abstract numerous observers rightly term the landless rural population the most intractable development problem in poor societies given the extraordinary political and administrative obstacles to redistrubution of rural assets in india the widely recognized failture land reforms attention and finances have recently been focused on public rural employment programmes to alleviate rural distribution within india the state of maharashtra with a size and population of a large european nation has instituted a striking departure from traditional rural works programmes a guarantee of employment to rural adults on demand the employment guarantee scheme in one state has since become a significant policy model and the experience in that state provides something like a laboratory for its analysis based on analysis of previous studies and original field work in rural maharashtra the article argues that the scheme is something of a rare bird a programme which seems to be in the objective and subjective interests of the rural poor as well as consistent with the interests of the rural landed elite despite their early political objections the fiscal structure of the scheme is a direct contradiction of lipton s 1977 model of urban bias in third world development strategies the employment guarantee scheme is rather more a manifestation of kulak power though promulgated as an alternative to policies entailing redistribution of rural assets and clearly superior to doing nothing about rural distribution the scheme is inferior to genuine redistribution in terms of altering the rural political economy the functions if not the motivations of the scheme are profoundly conservative in a structural sense politically and economically the philosophical underpinnings and perhaps potentially the consequences for mobilization of the rural poor are quite the opposite

child fostering in africa when labor and schooling motives may coexist abstract the paper proposes a theoretical framework for understanding purposive child fostering in africa whereby a non orphaned child is sent to live temporarily with relatives in the model adults decide whether to foster in or out a child in conjunction with other household choices e g own time allocation between market and non market activities children s amount of work and schooling by allowing for positive externalities from fostering and thus asymmetric motives for fostering in labor and out human capital the proposed framework predicts that school age children are sent to better off households and that some families may foster in and out simultaneously the model identifies the conditions under which all actors involved children included may benefit from fostering arrangements but also points to situations where fostering may become an opportunity to marginalize a subset of children the paper aims to provide a sound theoretical foundation that sheds light on why there exists mixed empirical evidence on the effects of fostering on children s well being and cautions against demonizing non parent residence as unequivocally detrimental to children

a theory of employment guarantees contestability credibility and distributional concerns abstract both raw intuition and past experience suggest that the success of an employment guarantee scheme egs in safeguarding the welfare of the poor depends both on the wage it promises and the ease with which any worker can gain access an egs is thus at once a wage guarantee and a rationing device we chart the positive and normative limits of such an egs as an efficiency improving and poverty alleviating policy reform in a canonical labor market setting at its core an egs provides an aggregate not just egs employment target given the target the egs wage and access can be fine tuned to deliver outcomes ranging from a contestable labor market to a simple universal unemployment benefit the credibility of any such target however is shown to be triggered endogenously by a host of factors the distributional concerns of the planner private sector productivity the prevalence of market power and the need for public works paradoxically the outcome with a planner who cares only about efficiency can be less efficient than the outcome with a planner whose social welfare function also gives weight to poverty

favoring domestic firms in procurement contracts abstract this paper studies the rationale for giving preference to domestic firms in the award of government contracts when the regulator is interested in maximizing domestic welfare it is seen that in the absence of comparative advantages the regulator should discriminate in favor of the domestic firms because foreign firms profits do not enter in domestic welfare furthermore i show that the form of the discrimination function depends on the mechanism being used in order to simplify the implementation of an optimal policy the regulator should choose mechanisms based on second price auctions

impoverishment technology and growth in rural india this paper seeks to demonstrate that the effects of the introd uction of new green revolution agriculture technology in rural indi a were highly ambiguous based on an analysis of rural households und ertaken between 1968 and 1971 the paper shows that a nonnegligible number of households became poorer it is argued that a key reason for this was the fact that large cultivators were able to benefit dispro portionately from the growth process unleased by the new technology it is conjectured on the basis of more recent evidence that there was a weakening over time in some of the causal mechanisms making for impoverishment copyright 1987 by oxford university press

optimal auctions revisited in symmetric privately known values oral auctions with costly entry for bidders the seller can do no better than by committing ex ante to a reservation price and entry fees or subsidies which result in no fewer and at most one more bidders than a reservation price equal to the seller s value would in the absence of entry fees or subsidies journal of economic literature classification numbers d44 c72

intra household gender disparity in school choice evidence from private schooling in india abstractthis paper explores gender inequality within households in the decision of private versus government school choice in india using a three period longitudinal dataset on rural households from uttar pradesh a northern state of india this paper estimates a household fixed effects model and finds that there is an intra household gender bias of 6 percentage points in private school enrolment among children aged 6 16 years contrary to the trend in overall enrolment the gender gap in private school choice is rising over time and is more pronounced in villages with a larger cost difference between private and government schooling this finding remains robust even after controlling for average school quality and considering potential endogeneity of the cost variables

discriminatory public procurement policy and cost reduction incentives abstract discriminating in favor of domestic suppliers in the award of government procurement contracts is a widespread practice in this paper we extend the previous analysis of mcafee and mcmillan 1989 government procurement and international trade journal of international economics 26 291 308 and branco 1994 favoring domestic firms in procurement contracts journal of international economics 37 65 80 by considering in the same model the bidding competition stimulation effect and the favoritism effect we prove that the optimal policy can be implemented by a modified vickrey auction or by a complex modified first price auction we also consider that firms can reduce their cost by a nonobservable effort we show that taking moral hazard into account does not modify the awarding rule but that the government must use the payment rule to require a greater level of effort from the favored firm

distribution network prices and solar pv resolving rate instability and wealth transfers through demand tariffs 1 in 4 detached households in southeast queensland have installed rooftop solar pv amongst the highest take up rates in the world electricity distribution network capacity is primarily driven by periodic demand and household load generally peaks in the early evening whereas solar pv production peaks during the middle of the day and thus a mismatch exists compounding matters is the fact that the structure of the regulated two part network tariff is dominated by a flat rate variable charge in this article interval meter data at the customer switchboard circuit level confirms that solar households use only slightly less peak capacity than non solar households and that non trivial cross subsidies are rapidly emerging a tariff model demonstrates that a peak capacity based demand tariff is a more efficient cost reflective and equitable pricing structure that improves the stability of tariffs given a rate of return regulatory constraint

transfer benefits from public works employment evidence for rural india current knowledge provides little guidance on one of the key questions in evaluating public employment schemes aimed at directly reducing poverty what are the net income gains to participating workers this paper offers an answer for rural public employment in two villages in the state of maharashtra in india a model of intrahousehold time allocation is proposed and estimates are made using household data over six years the empirical implementation indicates that the projects induce significant behavioral responses transfer benefits are large and are greatly underestimated using prevailing market wage rates for similar work to estimate forgone incomes copyright 1994 by royal economic society

economic performance and policies for grid connected residential solar photovoltaic systems in brazil abstract we analyze the economic competitiveness of grid connected distributed solar photovoltaic generation through small scale rooftop installations in five brazilian state capitals the locations represent a comprehensive set of the two essential parameters for the economic viability of pv solar irradiation and local electricity tariffs levelized electricity costs lec for pv generation and net present values npv for a specific pv system are presented the analysis comprises three different interest rate scenarios reflecting different conditions for capital acquisition to finance the generators subsidized mature market and country specific risk adjusted interest in the npv analysis revenue flow is modeled by the sale of pv electricity at current residential tariffs assuming net metering using subsidized interest rates the analysis shows that solar pv electricity is already competitive in brazil while in the country specific risk adjusted rate the declining but still high capital costs of pv make it economically unfeasible at a mature market interest rate pv competitiveness is largely dependent on the residential tariff economic competitiveness in this scenario is given for locations with high residential tariffs we demonstrate the high potential of distributed generation with photovoltaic installations in brazil and show that under certain conditions grid connected pv can be economically competitive in a developing country

chaos in power pakistan s electricity crisis abstract pakistan is facing a severe electricity crisis due to a persistent and widening gap between demand and available system generating capacity the worsening of power shortages has become a major political issue reflecting the hardships for individuals and businesses it threatens to undermine the credibility and legitimacy of government and to further stress the social fabric of the country the power crisis did not emerge suddenly it is the direct result of imprudent and reckless energy policies over the last three decades these policies have impeded the development of cheap and abundant domestic energy sources they have also resulted in very inefficient fuel mix choices compromising energy and economic security pakistan s energy bankruptcy is ultimately due to massive institutional and governance failure this paper analyzes the problems confronting pakistan s electricity sector and identifies the key elements of a potential policy response to address the country s severe power crisis

real income equivalence among one earner and two earner families in an earlier paper we proposed a technique for making income comparisons across various household sizes in this paper we employ a modified version of that method to convert nominal income to some real equivalent comparable across families of a given size but with one or two family earners we begin with a discussion of some of the conceptual difficulties involved in making cross family size or structure comparisons in income we then describe spending pattern differences between one and two earner families the final section discusses our effort to convert nominal income into comparable real income units we conclude that nominal income differences between two and one earner families far overstate differences in standards of living excerpt

entry and competition effects in first price auctions theory and evidence from procurement auctions motivated by several interesting features of the highway mowing auction data from the texas department of transportation tdot we study three competing procurement auction models with endogenous entry our entry and bidding models provide several interesting implications for the first time we show that even within an independent private value paradigm as the number of potential bidders increases bidders equilibrium bidding behaviour can become less aggressive and the expected procurement cost may rise because the entry effect is always positive and may dominate the negative competition effect we then develop structural models of entry and bidding corresponding to the three models under consideration controlling for unobserved auction heterogeneity and use the recently developed semi parametric bayesian estimation method to analyse the data we select the model that best fits the data and use the corresponding structural estimates to quantify the entry effect and the competition effect with regard to the individual bids and the procurement cost copyright 2009 wiley blackwell

on the coverage of public employment schemes for poverty alleviation abstract the cost effectiveness of public employment as a means of poverty alleviation depends on policy design choices concerning coverage and wage rates the choice is between schemes which aim for wide coverage at potentially low wages and schemes which ration participation so that more beneficiaries can escape poverty conditions are derived for ranking stylized policy alternatives in terms of a broad class of poverty measures the preferred policy is shown to depend on the budget level administrative cost the initial wage distribution and the policy maker s aversion to poverty empirical simulations for bangladesh data generally support wide coverage for distributionally sensitivity poverty measures but limited coverage for other measures

squaring the sunny circle on balancing distributive justice of power grid costs and incentives for solar prosumers abstract solar prosumers are about to revolutionize the power sector utilities are challenged in recovering the costs of distribution grids as parts of their revenue basis decreases through self consumption adjusting the grid tariff sets off a reinforcing feedback loop that increases the attractiveness of solar investments but also leads to a distribution effect between solar prosumers and conventional consumers the question is how to recover distribution grid costs equitable without hampering the diffusion of solar power can the two criteria be fulfilled at the same time or is do we aim for squaring a circle to address this question i present a system dynamics simulation model designed to understand the interactions and assess these competing goals the occurring distribution effect under the volumetric grid tariff with net purchase and sale appears to be rather limited simulation experiments reveal that grid tariff designs strongly influence investments for solar power a capacity tariff can reduce deviations from the cost causation principle of solar prosumers and incentivizes investments in decentralized storage solutions to reduce peak demand nevertheless also the capacity tariff causes a distribution effect

on optimal reservation prices in auctions the theory of auction design examines how various factors affect the outcome of an auction most of the existing literature focuses on how varying the amount of information available to each bidder affects the bid taker s expected revenue when all other factors remain constant this paper studies how the bid taker s expected revenue varies with changes in the auction format when such changes affect the number of bidders and in turn the bidders maximum value for the object being sold specifically we examine how varying the reservation price or screening level affects the bid taker s expected revenue though its effect on the number of bidders for two simple examples the losses associated with a reduced number of bidders outweighs any benefits that nontrivial reservation prices might have had in models with an exogonously set number of bidders

government procurement and international trade abstract we model the bidding for a government contract in which there is imperfect competition each bidder is better informed about his own costs than either his rival bidders or the government and the distribution of the domestic firms costs differs from the distribution of foreign firms costs because of comparative advantage effects we find that the government minimizes its expected procurement cost by operating a price preference policy not necessarily purchasing from the lowest bidder

traditional vs modern production systems price and nonmarket considerations of cacao producers in northern ecuador many factors besides profit maximization such as nonmarket ecological and social benefits influence smallholder households to adopt a specific agricultural production system or sell in a particular market thus different analytical techniques are needed that take into consideration more than monetary income to fully capture these additional benefits to better understand the production decisions of smallholder farmers we build on previous work on the household model and shadow wage estimation to develop a shadow wage for ecuadorian cacao producers that includes these nonmarket benefits we found that the shadow wage correctly indicated that on average these households would prefer to use an agroforestry production system instead of the more profitable modern system because of the nonmarket benefits received from the former system

solar energy markets economics and policies abstract solar energy has experienced phenomenal growth in recent years due to both technological improvements resulting in cost reductions and government policies supportive of renewable energy development and utilization this study analyzes the technical economic and policy aspects of solar energy development and deployment while the cost of solar energy has declined rapidly in the recent past it still remains much higher than the cost of conventional energy technologies like other renewable energy technologies solar energy benefits from fiscal and regulatory incentives including tax credits and exemptions feed in tariff preferential interest rates renewable portfolio standards and voluntary green power programs in many countries the emerging carbon credit markets are expected to provide additional incentives to solar energy deployment however the scale of incentives provided by the existing carbon market instruments such as the clean development mechanism of the kyoto protocol is limited despite the huge technical potential the development and large scale deployment of solar energy technologies world wide still has to overcome a number of technical financial regulatory and institutional barriers the continuation of policy supports might be necessary for several decades to maintain and enhance the growth of solar energy in both developed and developing countries

the doping effect of italian feed in tariffs on the pv market abstract in less than six years italy has become one of the leading markets for pv power plants and one of the countries in the world with the largest number of installations and installed peak power such a quick and large growth is due to a series of feed in tariff schemes that have been uncapped until 2012 as a matter of fact any size or any number of pv power plants could be installed during a period of three years since the feed in tariffs are not paid by national taxes but are charged on the electricity bills italian energy users are now due to pay each year a surcharge of 9 billion euros on their energy bills this paper aims at discussing this development by highlighting the benefits but also some significant drawbacks that the application of uncontrolled feed in tariffs has produced

participation costs and efficient auctions abstract suppose that risk neutral agents have independently and perhaps asymmetrically distributed private valuations for an indivisible object a mechanism assigns the object but it is costly to send messages to the coordinator in these circumstances the second price auction has an equilibrium that is classicallyex anteefficient given general opportunities to invest in information about or enhancements of own valuations in contrast the first price sealed bid auction may have no efficient equilibrium even if buyers are symmetric other properties of the first price auction are proved a semirevelation principle is established for mechanisms with participation costs journal of economic literatureclassification numbers d44 d82

promoting fair competition in public procurement abstract if a government cares for local firms profit but not for foreign firms foreign firms will be discriminated against when competing for government procurement contracts foreign firms will be chosen less often and when chosen earn less profit than local firms we analyze a more central authority s policies against such discrimination given a situation in which a government has private information on product quality and the competing firms have private information on own costs necessary and sufficient conditions for free revelation of quality information are derived finally optimal policy when these conditions are not satisfied is characterized and discussed

how dependent are the rural poor on the employment guarantee scheme in india an analysis of the icrisat data for two villages in the indian state of maharashtra points to mistargeting of the employment guarantee scheme egs there was a marked deterioration in it over the period 1979 89 reflected in not just a larger concentration of the more affluent among the egs participants but also their much larger gains from participating in this scheme nevertheless a large subset of the chronically poor depended heavily on egs as an additional source of income with significant welfare gains during 1979 84 but a large subset especially of relatively low income participants also withdrew from egs when overall economic conditions improved besides egs earnings varied consistently with economic conditions although the present analysis raises some concerns about the mistargeting of egs and in this context about the design and implementation of this scheme the presumption that such public support makes the poor perpetually dependent on it seems somewhat exaggerated if not mistaken

auction design and favoritism abstract the theory of auctions has ignored the fact that often auction designers not the principal design auctions in a multi attribute auction the auction designer may bias his subjective evaluation of quality or distort the relative weights of the various attributes to favor a specific bidder an ancient concern in the procurement of weapons in the auctioning of government contracts and in the purchase of electricity by regulated power companies the paper analyzes the steps to be taken to reduce the possibility of favoritism it is first shown that in the absence of favoritism quality differentials among firms are more likely to be ignored if the auction designer has imperfect information about the firm s costs second if the auction designer may collude with only one bidder the other bidders should be chosen if they are at least as efficient as the former bidder and no hard information about quality differentials is released by the auction designer that would justify fair discrimination in favor of the former bidder last if the auction designer can collude with any bidder the optimal auction tends to a symmetric auction in which quality differentials are ignored the possibility of favoritism reduces the auction designer s discretion and makes the selection process focus on non manipulable monetary dimensions of bids

market opportunities genetic endowments and intrafamily resource distribution child survival in rural india the authors examine how intrafamily resource allocations respond to changes in economic conditions and to genetic differences in children by estimating the determinants of variations in the sex specific survival differentials of rural indian children based on standard census and household survey data they explore in particular the hypothesis that such differences are related to the relative returns to survival with households selectively allocating resources to children in response to variation in sex differences in their expected earnings opportunities as adults data are from the 1961 census and a 1971 household survey excerpt

renewable energy sources in power generation in pakistan abstract pakistan as an underdeveloped and populous country requires an uninterrupted source of energy to keep its development on track and provide its citizens with a reasonable standard of living conversely the country is unable to fulfil its domestic energy requirements and is undergoing an acute energy crisis electricity is a sector that has suffered the most from the energy shortages the gap between demand and supply is met through blackouts and at times the country plunges into darkness for more than 10 12 h a day this crisis that the country is currently facing did not occur overnight the root cause of this debacle goes back in history and can be attributed to decades of mismanagement poor planning and negligence this article provides a comprehensive overview of the electricity sector in pakistan and the issues it is beset with in addition an analysis of the energy policies that the country has announced over the years as well as the impact that they have had on the electricity sector is presented it is concluded that pakistan s existing energy mix is not sustainable due to the excessive reliance on imported fossil fuels rising electricity generation cost and increase in power generation related emissions this paper develops a roadmap and proposes the energy sources that can fulfil the country s rising energy requirements whilst being sustainable at the same time the roadmap identifies and highlights the primary tasks that the country must undertake to reach its vision of meeting its energy needs and integrating renewable energy sources in the power generation the recommendations of this paper will provide guidelines to the decision makers and policymakers with an insight on how the energy technology and resource development should be carried out which sources should be given priority and how the issues should be resolved both in the short and long term

towards a theory of famine relief policy abstract this paper examines how famine mortality is related to the distribution of food consumption a theoretical model is proposed of how individual survival chances are affected by changes in consumption uncertainty in survival prospects arises from the errors made by any observer in assessing health at given current consumption the theory is used to explore two policy issues in famine relief the choice of budgetary rules for allocating emergency aid and the case for price stabilization policies during famines applications to data for two famines in south asia suggest that successful price stabilization would have had substantial benefits in reducing mortality